I love to spell! S-P-E-L-L!

Can you tell we watch a little PBS? I love spelling. I love to know how to spell words. I get so frustrated when I am on Facebook and people can't or won't spell correctly. My friends call me the Spelling/Grammar Nazi. It is a badge I wear proudly. I use the Oxford Comma. I know that "reoccurring" isn't a word and neither is "irregardless" (two of my pet peeves). I also know the proper way to spell "spigot" and that Dumpster and Bandaid are proper nouns and that when a preposition is an adverb it IS okay to end your sentence with it. I have issues with "your and you're," "its and it's'" and "there, their, and they're." I hate it when people use "I" and "me" incorrectly and am often heard correcting it.
Yes, it is a sickness, a special kind of OCD that I will carry forever. My children, on the other hand, have not (before this year) been subject to the same demanding spelling and grammar curriculum as I. However, as an A Beka student, they have now! I have discovered two things. One: I cannot do spelling with Kadoodle because it stresses her out to the point of her not learning. I put our spelling book aside before last year's end to attempt a better understanding of phonics, grammar, and sentence structure. We have recently picked up her spelling book again and I am delighted to see that the words she struggled with before, she is now spelling with ease. I am so glad we backed off. The other thing I discovered is that my then fourth grader was losing interest in spelling because she was bored. We were spending two weeks per lesson and I was getting frustrated. I KNEW she knew how to spell these words, but she would NOT do the work I gave her. I tried different tactics. I have an entire arsenal of spelling games and things I used with my fifth graders when I taught. I tried some of them. They didn't work. We were fallling behind in Spelling and I was getting frustrated. So I did what I knew wouldn't happen in many public schools. I asked her about it. I was right. She was bored. She got tired of "learning" words she already knew. So I did what any homeschool mom would do. I changed the way we do spelling.
Now some people are going to read this and think, "Duh! Everyone knows that." Well, I did not so on the off chance that I am not the only one who did not, I am sharing what we decided to do.
Every week, I give Boo 40-60 spelling words. It depends on the week and what we have going on and how much time I want to spend on spelling. On Monday, she takes a test on those words. Every word that she already knows how to spell gets crossed off the list. Then she writes the words that are left three times each. On Tuesday, she tests again and we take the words off that she knows. Then we discuss the words that she missed. We talk about the rules of spelling and why they are spelled the way they are.

My sassy speller

Boo is a whole word reader and never really learned Phonics as it wasn't taught much in her school at the time she needed it. Because of this she spelled words like "furniture" as "furnichure." No one had ever taught her suffixes like -tion, -ture, -cious, -ous, and the difference between -ly and -ely. These were things we would bring to focus. By Thursday, she was routinely testing through two or three lists without issue and we were able to take Fridays "off" of spelling. Not only was she able to catch up the lists she had missed, but she was also able to master about 60 vocabulary words and their spelling, AND finished spelling about four weeks before the "end" of our school year.
Our spelling time went from torture to treasure and I now have a child who spells MUCH better on a regular basis, even when she is in a hurry. I highly recommend this to anyone who has a child who is a competent speller but struggles with sitting still to do "seatwork." It has made a major change in our Spring and as I look forward to her fifth grade spelling book, I do so without trepidation, but with anticipation of what she masters next. To me, THIS is what homeschooling is all about!