The kind representative listened thoughtfully and nodded sympathetically as I explained our frustrating year. One afternoon, I headed over to the Institute for Excellence in Writing booth to explain to them the situation (we love pretty much everything they have). But I just wasn’t finding anything that seemed like it was different enough to turn us around. That gave me the chance to look through numerous spelling curricula. It worked out well that we traveled to speak at several homeschool conferences that Spring. We eventually dropped the entire language arts program because it was causing entirely too much stress in my little boys life (and by proxy, in my life too). What’s a Mom to do?Īfter about 4 months of it, we slowly started dropping pieces of the program.

The drill-and-kill approach just wasn’t working. I made the mistake of assuming Cameron would be an intuitive speller, but he wasn’t. He was a good reader, and good readers are supposed to be good spellers, right? Well, not always. I had assumed Cameron, like his older brother, would just get spelling. Then he took the spelling test at the end of the week. He did the little word finds and other spelling activities. He wrote out his spelling words each day. We trudged through it all for about 4 months. While he didn’t particularly like any of it, it was really the spelling portion that put the nail in that curriculum’s coffin. I decided to go with an all-in-one language arts curriculum-little bit of grammar, little bit of writing, and the spelling. It broke his mama’s heart: instead of finding joy from his learning, he was beginning to despise it (well, at least in this subject). He hadn’t ever spoken like that about any of his school subjects. The tears flowed freely as my son declared he hated language arts.

Spelling of actionally