How to do 9 Weeks of Spelling in 20 Minutes

We homeschool in that gray area of not quite unschooling.  I call us “relaxed, eclectic” homeschoolers because it sums us up best and also nicely avoids labels where there are rules we have to follow.

Yes, I am so anti-authority that I balk at unschooling rules.  😉

I have also been on the wrong end of the Evil Unschool Queen, and also just occasionally like being able to go “Wait!  We haven’t done spelling in months!  Spell kumquat!” and have my poor hapless children have to comply.

Ah, the power.

Anyway, today was one of those days when I suddenly decided we should do spelling.  And since we hadn’t done spelling in months (in a “schooly” way), I decided we needed to make up for lost ground.

So I googled “third grade spelling lists” and presto, found this nice teacher who’d done some work for me.  A year’s worth of spelling lists for Anna.   Then I called Anna up, found her a notebook and a pen that worked, and told her we were going to do spelling (sorry, Evil Unschool Queen, she was thrilled).

Since it seemed kind of silly to make her spend a bunch of time writing words she already knew, I just read the words out loud and had her spell them orally.  If she got them right, we kept going.  If she got one wrong, I spelled it out for her and had her write it down.

I told her we’d keep going until she had 10 words written down.

We went through week 9 before we had enough.

After that, I asked her to write each word in a sentence.

She wrote them out, had fun being creative and silly with her sentences, and learned them.  I’ll add those 10 to the list when we take it up next time (which could be in March when I suddenly shriek that we haven’t done spelling again).

Then I printed out a year’s worth of 5th grade for Victoria and asked Daryl to read through them with her to do the same.  She, too, had a blast and did great.

Think how many hours the poor kids would have wasted writing out words they already knew if they did spelling every day.  And since they only have to do spelling every other blue moon, they think it’s a treat and happily eat it up.  It’s win, win, if you ask me.

Or at least it works for us.  🙂

Now if I could only figure out how to do 9 weeks of laundry in 20 minutes…