When my son was attending kindergarten in Malaysia 2 years ago, I had no choice. I cannot change the syllabus of the school. Everyone is taking test and learning spelling. Can he do without those? I had completely no idea on the alternative method to learn Spelling.
Some Singapore kindergartens do not have any "Spelling" sessions. Sometimes I was worried. I wondered whether he could cope with school as the level of English education in Singapore is very high. I bought some spelling games. The game was good, but too simple for my 6-year-old as it has only 3-4 letters word.
Being successful in using the "Hooked on Phonics" material, I decided to try the "Hooked on Spelling". I bought it from Amazon directly. The material came with 2CDs plus a book. Due to misunderstanding as I did not read the instructions carefully, I did not use any of the books but only the CDs.
The lessons start with "sounding out words". Then, it is followed by activity to group the words according to the sounding of pronunciation. After this comes the so called "unscramble" game which is a game requiring the user to re-arrange letters into a word with correct spelling. The next level is slightly more difficult. It's spelling game but with multiple choices. The activity is to pick the right letter to form a word. Finally, the user has to spell the whole word all by himself.
The material is "Superb". If he does it wrongly, the software lets him spell again. No scolding, no pressure! Again, the software comes with a progress sheet in which the child will put a sticker to show his progress.
My son told us some rules and what he learned, which was quite new to both my wife and me, like long "I" and short "I". My son's capability in spelling improved significantly. His teacher told us that she told the class "If any of you have problems in spelling out any words, you can either ask me or Yi Kai". Last week, I asked him to spell "library", this is a new word to my 6-year-old. He said, "libary", very close! I praised him for his good attempt and encouraged him to learn more. Now, he is interested to spell things right.
On a side note, there are some bugs in the software, but my son can get around it. I am not sure how he did it because he learns the lessons from the CDs all by himself. I did not follow closely, but I can see the combination effect, by Hooked on Spelling, as well as Hooked on Phonics!
2 comments:
I just realized that the price has increased. If not mistaken, I bought this at USD29.95, but today, I can see that it's selling at higher price.
Some people are selling even higher than the publisher (USD39.95) http://www.hookedonphonics.com/hooked-on-spelling
Do your survey, and remember, some website do not sell oversea.
Ya. Hooked on Spelling saves us a lot of time and effort to teach our 7-year-old. He does it almost all by himself with very little supervision, starting up the computer, running the program, going through the lesson, and finally attaching the sticker. He takes initiative to do it once per week following the "timetable" we set for him. Most importantly, he maintains his interest in spelling! The last thing we want is for him to develop a phobia towards "spelling test"!
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