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Hi,
I have a question about LHFHG and Beyond. I'm planning to start LHFHG this August with my 5yo. She's already done a year of phonics and reads pretty well (but she has a tendency to guess on longer words). We are past the point of the phonics books in LHFHG, but I don't want to just take a year off and lose that idea of the connection between sounds and letters. I was thinking about a gentle introduction to spelling, something fun with manipulatives, then I found out that Beyond has spelling in it. So has anyone used the spelling part of Beyond while doing everything else in LHFHG? My concern is that she's not ready for the LA or the writing, we still need lots of practice writing. And I don't know what the word lists in Beyond are like, and if they make good connections between phonograms and spelling rules (if that makes sense). Even now she's asking me lots of "why" questions about when phonograms make which sound and I need something with guidance to answer her.

Any input appreciated!

Hi! I researched quite a few 1st grade spelling programs looking for strong phonics connections and I came right back to the lists in Beyond. I was irritated that every workbook I looked at had exercises that required the dc to look at correct and incorrect spellings of a word, and pick the right one. How is *that* supposed to help them visualize the correct spelling??? I don't have my guide in front of me, so bear with me In list 1, there are 10 words each week, and they have 8 words that follow the rule, and 2 that are "rule-breakers". For example, one week it long "i" with silent E, and the words are mine, five, line etc., and one of the rule-breakers is "give". The rule-breakers are related to the rule that week, not random. The weeks are words with short a, short e, short i etc, long a, long e, long i, etc, or, ar, er, double consonants, and so on. After every 6 weeks there's a review week. The activities are simple, but they are effective and now that we're 13 weeks in, my ds has figured out that they are *very quick*, if he just gets to it You write the words on cards, and on day 1 you have them study the word, turn it over and write it from memory, then check it. Repeat for all words. Day 2 you say the word, use it in a sentence, have them write it from memory, and have them check it. Day 3 you pick 3 words they need to practice (we started with 2) and help them come up with a sentence, you write it and have them copy it and check it. Day 4 is a repeat of Day 2, with a variety of rotating activities to practice words that were missed, like spelling while doing jumping jacks, or writing them on the pavement in chalk. Day 5 we ignore at this point because it's grammar. I'm only 1/3 of the way through them, but I'm impressed with the simplicity and effectiveness thus far. HTH

I would recommend Phonics Pathways to teach her the more advanced phonics rules. It also teaches reading multisylable words very well.

Is she ready for the ER readers? Even if you do spelling, I'd keep her reading.

Kristin has done a good job explaining the spelling to you. We will be starting Beyond in the fall so I haven't actually used it yet, but do have the guide. One thing I wanted to point out is that there are 2 spelling lists each week so if you do decided to use it with LHFHG this year, you would still be able to use list 2 in the guide again next year when you actually do Beyond.

We are using LHFHG as our main guide, but we use Beyond for Spelling, the Emerging Reader schedule, and Math Activities.

Like the pp said, I would only do the spelling if your dd is also ready for the Emerging Readers. When we started this year, my son read pretty fluently, but I didn't really want to start any formal spelling instruction until later. I started out the year just reviewing the sound patterns (using word lists and doing "sound searches") and having my son read the ERs. Then I noticed that he was misspelling pretty often when he would write for fun. So then I started thinking that we should start doing spelling. We already had the Beyond guide for reading and math, so I began doing the spelling lessons for him.

It is working well for us. It has been a good review of the sound patterns for reading as well as an aid to improve his spelling. I do one tweak in order to lessen the handwriting load - on the day that my ds composes/dictates his own original sentence, I write the sentence with a blank space for him to write in the spelling word only, instead of having him copy the whole sentence. We are already doing A Reason for Handwriting, so I think that is enough handwriting instruction per day for us.

There are two spelling lists in Beyond, as pp has mentioned. So, we are doing "List 1" now with LHFHG. When we do Beyond next year as our main guide, we will do "List 2" with the lessons exactly as written in the guide along with the LA lessons (we are not doing the grammar lessons right now).

Hope that helps!

If your dd is ready to write words and sentences, then I would start the Spelling List 1 in Beyond. Kristen did an awesome job of explaining the rotation of skills taught within the spelling plans in Beyond. If your dd can do those things, then it makes great sense to do Spelling List 1 and its accompanying plans along with them this year with LHFHG, and then do Spelling List 2 and its accompanying plans along with them next year with Beyond. If this is too much of a stretch for dd, then I'd do Explode the Code Books 1-3. HTH!

In Christ,
Julie