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My DD will be starting beyond tomorrow. I think she can breeze through a lot of it. So do you think it would be ok if I just went through a list a day and when we come across 10 she can't spell, make that a list we spend a week on?

Are you using List 1 or List 2? With my son (we're in unit 2) we just started with List 2--he's 6.5.

List 2, she'll be 8 in Aug and is in grade 2.

I started off going faster with them then I started picking 4 words from 3-4 lists at a time and doing those in one week so she still got to do the activities with them. When we finished the lists for level 2, we started dictation. I didn't start at number 1 in dication, I think we jumped ahead quite a bit. Now we take it at regular pace even if she could have jumped ahead more. I want to train her in dication from the beginning b/c there is more to dictation than just spelling. It's worked quite well!

When my son did Beyond, I started by pretesting him on the words from both lists orally. If he knew how to spell them all, we went on the next weeks lists on the next day. If not, we worked on the ones he missed using Carrie's techniques. It's not quite by the book, but that's how we did it.

netpea wrote:When my son did Beyond, I started by pretesting him on the words from both lists orally. If he knew how to spell them all, we went on the next weeks lists on the next day. If not, we worked on the ones he missed using Carrie's techniques. It's not quite by the book, but that's how we did it.

That's basically how "Spelling Power" works (what we've been trying to use). We tend to "forget" to do spelling so I've been lurking on this thread to see what others are doing. My daughter is what they call a "natural speller," which makes spelling lists seem like a waste of time. Are there spelling lists for each week so that you could pretest and then skip spelling for the week if they know how to spell them all? Or do you continue on with the next list because they become more challenging?
Dorinda

I am trying Carrie's method's this year after coming from Spelling Power. So I would love to know if your idea is "ok" b/c I love the idea if they know a word(s) they move on....can't wait to hear what the repliesvare

Bibliophile wrote: Are there spelling lists for each week so that you could pretest and then skip spelling for the week if they know how to spell them all? Or do you continue on with the next list because they become more challenging?
Dorinda

The lists are in the Appendix. For each Unit there are two lists. Carrie suggests doing List 1 for new spellers and List 2 for older spellers. After completing List 1 and List 2, you are ready for dictation. So as I said each unit has two lists, and you are really supposed to just use one of them. My son is a very good speller, so we did both lists and sped it up a great deal. After we worked through all the words in the Unit, we just went on to the next unit.
Example for Unit 1:
List 1 - at, and, an, can, man, ran, ask, had, has, as
List 2 - am, bad, tan, hand, land, last, fast, glad, back, that

Unit 2:
List 1 - let, set, yes, get, ten, men, bed, red, the, them
List 2 - open, sled, end, send, best, help, next, went, then, when

Now my daughter will finish up LHFHG in a month and then move into Beyond. I will probably just use List 1 for her each week. As she had a harder time with reading and doesn't seem to come by spelling naturally. She has to work at it more.

We'd recommend choosing List 2 if your daughter is a good speller. When we went through the spelling lists in Beyond with my second son, he never needed to do List 1, as he'd already done Explode the Code and was a very good natural speller. However, when we did List 2, we just went at the regular pace following the plans as written in Beyond. He rarely, if ever, missed a word yet the year of growing up before doing dictation was good for him.

You also don't want to get to the point where every word on your child's spelling list is difficult, so you won't want to store up words from previous lists until you get a list that is all problem words. It's better to let kiddos focus on one or two words that they've missed at a time and really get them down. The point of List 1 and List 2 in Beyond is to cover the most commonly used sight words, Dolch words, and grade level wordsthat will be used throughout all of writing in the coming years. The word lists are also done in patterns, so kiddos see the words in patterns too. Then, after List 2, we switch to studied dictation as it teaches kiddos to spell well within the context of writing.

Blessings,
Carrie