We finished Step 21 today (out of 24) in our All About Spelling program. In about 3-4 weeks, we’ll be on to Level 2! Here is what the AAS board looks like at the end of Level 1. You’ll have two sets of letters (vowels are in red, and you’ll notice “y” has one red tile). You’ll see a blank consonant (blue) tile and a blank red tile to assist with spelling words when we need to apply a rule first. The Consonant Teams we’ve learned so far in spelling are: th, ch, sh, ck, ng, and nk.

Today we finished up nk words. At the beginning of this lesson you’ll line up all the vowels EXCEPT e, as e never goes before -nk. (Maybe it does in very rare words…)  Same as the -ng rule, where e rarely goes before -ng.

Each Step takes us about 3-4 lessons, usually 3. Since we strive to do three spelling lessons a week, each Step takes us a week to finish.

The first day we review, and All About Spelling has a pretty great system for review. We tackle the review cards in our AAS file box. Then we learn the current step’s lesson. We use the tile board for spelling out the first 10 words. These are the same words that we store in our Index file box, and we’ll put them in the “Review” section. The next day we’ll spell those 10 words on paper. Usually this doesn’t take too long, so we’ll also spell a few “More Words”. The final day we’ll spell the rest of the “More Words”, and a list of Phrases. Usually the phrases has the  original 10 words in the phrases, so if Satori gets them right, I can move them into the “Mastered” section. Only in a great while will we take out our Mastered cards and review them.

Then, once a lesson is done, we put up a sticker on our chart! (Stickers don’t come with the program, we chose the most happy stickers we had at the time.) Our hopping frogs are very happy looking, so we do our Happy Hoppy Frog Dance!

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