Spawned by the selling divisions of large companies, reading book corporations have convinced a few state school boards, superintendents, supervisors, principals, and other decision makers that they need not buy spelling books for the reason that "your child gets spelling in the reading program." What the reading program gives may cripple your son or daughter as a speller and put her in danger as being a expert reader and author.
Gentry fail to reveal that he is, or has been, the writer of an expensive spelling book series so his thoughts ought to be regarded with doubt, more as an advert than a well reasoned educational suggestion. Surely spelling ought to be educated methodically but to suggest that using a spelling book designed for grade level order is the only answer overlooks many different approaches which are perhaps more engaging and meet the diverse needs of scholars better.
Currently three major toxic delivery systems for spelling instruction are infecting American schools. Each of them fails to provide a spiraling spelling curriculum and none is research-based or proven. It’s ludicrous given the evolving and expanding research base for the importance of spelling knowledge for developing readers and writers in elementary school. One toxic system purports to give children "spelling words their way" with games and word sorting as a replacement for spelling books. Probably the most egregious is the pretense that spelling is taught in the reading program.
A new trend is to add a spelling component to the already cumbersome reading basal which is purchased by many districts to provide a curriculum for teaching reading at each grade level. This spelling component in reading trend began a few years ago as a marketing technique: "Buy our reading program and we’ll give you spelling for free!" That sounds appealing in our struggling economy, but buyer, beware. What you get is busy-work worksheets, no curriculum, the wrong words to memorize at a particular grade level, badly designed exercises that were developed by product-development companies with no expertise in spelling education, or a watered-down version of the kind of instruction that creates a powerful speller. At best teachers who are forced to use these programs don’t teach spelling, they assign it.
This year, the Texas State Board of Education is making a move to combat this egregious move backward in literacy education by calling for a state-wide standalone spelling book adoption. In the big scheme of things, spelling books are a small investment and deliver a big bang for the buck. If you see a spelling book coming home it means your child has a spelling curriculum in school. A tradition of having the parent involved with the complexities of teaching and practicing English spelling is a boon to your child’s education. Yes, your child should have spelling homework. Spelling knowledge increases reading and writing proficiency which impacts student performance across the entire school curriculum. We all should applaud this call for a spelling textbook adoption in Texas.
One example of the need for new books is the introduction of new technologies including eBook format and technologies that allow teachers to incorporate practice activities at home on the computer and practice with interactive white board applications for teaching word patterns in class. The 21st century spelling book has come a long way from rote memorization of a word list. But back to the big lie. What do you get if you allow your child to be educated spelling in the reading program?
To answer this question, I analyzed the "spelling program" in the best-selling reading program currently in use in Texas. This program has a 2011 copyright and it’s the very same program one of the nation’s largest textbook publishers sells to schools nationwide–possibly in your child’s district. Here’s what I found in the Unit 3, Grade 4 teacher’s edition:
Where’s Spelling?
The obvious place to find the spelling component in the reading program is the table of contents. But in Unit 3, a mammoth, 487-page, 11 inch x 12 inch teacher’s guide that only covers five weeks of the reading curriculum, there is absolutely no mention of spelling in the table of contents.
This huge, unwieldy teacher’s guide provides 70+ pages each week to guide the teacher in teaching the reading lesson. The seventy pages for each week begin with a two-page "Suggested Weekly Plan." There one finds spelling competing with grammar and writing for the teacher’s and student’s attention. Only two pages in the 70-page guide for the week are devoted to spelling!
The two pitiful pages for spelling must compete with one page for decoding and recognizing common word parts; two pages of vocabulary strategies on Greek and Latin word parts that aren’t the same content as the spelling lesson; four pages of grammar focusing on regular verbs but again, totally unrelated to the spelling lesson. In other words, there is so much unrelated superficial stuff going on with word study in a particular week that many teachers either may not find the spelling lesson or will not have time to teach it.
There isn’t any in the handbook that I could find a spiraling curriculum that would show the parent what words and designs are educated at a specific grade level, no way to discover what your child learned last month or how this year’s curriculum relates to what is going to be educated at the following grade. Every kid will get the same wordlist as opposed to on-, above- and below-grade-level products for differentiation. All kids get the same four work sheets for practice. The class that is educated in fifth grade, "more words with -ed or -ing," should have been educated in fourth grade.
For years I have advocated teaching spelling to kids. Imaginative spelling, supercilious they will learn the intricacies of language just by reading these big lies. Right spelling of words is critical and our scholars should be educated how to do it. In my classroom the spelling is differentiated, word patterns are educated, we study words for digraphs, blends, vowel groups, we write about our spelling and these are third graders.
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