Is the teacher manual necessary for Spelling Workout?

[Karie]

I'm looking at levels E, F, and above.

Thanks!

[Andie]

I don't think so at all.

[GVA]

I've found it useful for E and up because some of the work involves vocabulary questions that aren't immediately obvious. It does make for faster checking for a tired mom whose spelling skills aren't that great past a certain level! :o

[swimnactmom]

We're on level E right now. The teacher's manual describes 3 vs. 5 day schedules for finishing each lessons as well as supplemental study activities. I don't think it's necessary though.

[debbiec]

I only bought the first one to get the format, but I never used it again for subsequent years. What you mainly would get from the TE is:

1. How to work through a lesson. This means that they recommend you giving a "pretest" to see how many of the words your child can spell on the list. Then introduce the spelling rule from the student workbook and have student make corrections to the pretest, noticing the application of the rule. Then you work through the different parts of the lesson over the week and then finally test at the end. Any words missed go into the back pages where you log missed words. Those words are to be retested on the next test and scratched off as the student tests corrtectly on those.

2. They recommend using the word for the pretest and test in a sentence, to give context. They give you sentences to say. Unless you are just totally brainfried from the hectic day, you can usually do that yourself. But on a bad day, it was nice to just read them and not have to think about it.

3. You can check your child's answers on the exercises much quicker than looking through every exercise and figuring out if they did it correctly. I only had one child homeschooling at the time, so I just checked it without the key. That could be a time issue with multiple kids though.

Other than those three things, that is all I saw that was extra in the TE.

[Karie]

Thanks everyone!!