Here’s the Level 3 packet you get. All the cards are scored, so they’re easy to tear apart, but it does take some time.

We’ll be adding new phonograms to our white board as we learn them. Here’s my packet full of future tiles, and you can see the magnet sheet that comes when you order these. I cut them all out and magnetized them probably a year ago.

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Here’s what our 2′x3′ whiteboard looks like after Level 2. We’ve got 2 sets of the alphabet  (3 for 3 and s), Consonant Teams (ch, sh, th, ng, nk, ck, wh) and Vowel Teams (ee,  ou, ow, oi, oy, au, aw), Sound of /er/ (er), and ar and or. Satori knows how to divide syllables that are open, closed, v-c-silent-e, vowel team and r-controlled. So does Daddy. Satori taught Daddy how to divide syllables. (He partakes in our lessons if we do them on the weekends, and spelling is one we love to do with him.)

We don’t always use the white board in spelling, like the lessons say to do for the 10 main words in each lesson. Satori just loves to write in her spelling book, or even spell orally. But I always try to introduce the new concepts with tiles. It’s just another method of keeping new concepts in her head (multi-sensory).

Here’s her spelling page from a few lessons back when we learned soft sound of ‘c’ words. For these oral dictations, I start with the 10 main lesson words, then progress to any “More Words” that apply to the rule(s) we’re learning. If she has no problem with that, and she wants to do more, then we progress to writing short phrases such as “a cube of ice”. Finally, we work up to full sentences.

The below lesson was when we learned that the silent-e has other functions aside from making vowels long. Can’t leave the word “have” without the silent-e, even though the a is short! English words don’t end in a “v” and we need that “e” there to prop the “v” up.

Here’s the last sentences in Level 2. For these dictations, I read the sentence in a normal tone just once. She repeats it and then spells it as a complete sentence. When we do it this way, she’s pretty good at writing them as proper sentences starting with a capital letter and ending with an end mark. I love how the phrases and sentences not only cover the lesson learned that week, but also previous lessons as review.

Just in case  you’re curious, here’s a sample Sentence dictation from Level 3. It looks like they drop the word phrases and include more sentences. The sentences exactly cover the words covered in the lesson, in Levels 1 and 2 they’d sometimes miss a few words. This sample here we should be hitting sometime in the fall of 2010.

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Today we hit the middle lesson in our Level 2 AAS book. These lessons (when we do them) just fly by, she learns certain things so quickly and some spelling things she picks up on her own. Today’s lesson was the double-e “ee” vowel pair making the long-e sound. The only word she spelled wrong was “dere” instead of “deer”. But she does correctly spells the word that doesn’t follow the rule, which is “been”.

You can see she understands sentence structure and sentences with capital letters and ends them appropriately. We do need to work on doing this in her random journal entries and letters to people though. Her letters are pretty much all formed correctly. But I have failed in getting her to use a correct tripod grip. She doesn’t think she writes as neat when she uses a proper grip. Frustrating, but I think I will move on from that.

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I framed her certificate and hung it up on the wall above her desk. (I erased out her last name for privacy purposes.) Satori was so excited we had to call Daddy and tell him the news!

Here’s a brief summary of what Satori learned in Level 1, which we started last June, when Satori was 4.5 years old. First off, All-About-Spelling is a vertical phonics program, so right away we started learning all the different sounds for each letter. Some vowels have 4 sounds, and some consonants had some tricky ones to remember, so this took a while! What she didn’t master right away simply went into our Review file. Next up we learned to segment words, how to hear the sounds in the words. We familiarized ourselves with the alphabet – its order, vowels and consonants. We went quickly through the lessons that taught how to spell words using their basic sounds, and the easy digraphs and blends.

Eventually we learned tougher concepts, like when to use a C or K for beginning sounds, when to use K or CK for ending sounds, when to double letters at the end (like “tell” or “dress”)… We learned consonant teams (“ng” and “nk”), compound words, plural words, and lastly, open syllables. The end of each lesson requires the child to spell our phrases or sentences, which was great practice to hear it orally and apply everything learned.

Here’s a sample of what Satori can now spell successfully.

Tomorrow we will pull out Level 2. I’ll have to do a little bit of organizing first, such as updating our AAS tile whiteboard with new sections such as “Vowel Teams” and “The Sound of /er/”. We’ll be starting a “Jail” to hold our spelling Rule Breakers. First lesson will be a review of Level 1, as well as learning more about open and closed syllable tags.

I’m looking forward to furthering Satori’s spelling skills. She always writes books and letters and will greatly benefit from learning more spelling rules. We have progressed far enough in our Reading subject that she already knows how to spell many things, but by systematically learning the rules, she won’t forget to add her silent-E, and so much more.

Here’s a sample of words we’ll learn in Level Two.

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Before we started Step 23 today we did a review. This program has a great system for review. In our Spelling Review box we tackle things we need to review. She has all the rules, Key Cards, phonograms memorized except for a couple like all the sounds for the letter “o”. AAS is a vertical phonics system, so we are to learn all the sounds of a phonogram right away. At first it can be daunting to be presented with all these sounds that even the parent didn’t have memorized, but in the end, it makes reading and spelling so much easier. It’s certainly paying off now that we’ve moved beyond the basic short vowel and consonant sounds.

I keep all the words Satori struggles with and we start out by spelling them. Here she is spelling them on her hanging white board.

Any words that are not spelled correctly get filed away in the Review tab of our index card box. Toward the end of Level 1, here is the remaining words she has a hard time spelling. Most of the time it comes down to pronunciation issues – instead of “drink” we pronounce it almost like “jrink”. “desktop” she wants to spell as “desctop” but I think she is catching on now. “pink” is always spelled “pick”, but I know she knows most of her -ink words, so this must be a pronunciation thing for her. “windmill” often forgets the double “l” at the end. Our hint:

Remember to floss!

I admit our spelling lesson went past 20 minutes today, I wanted to get a very thorough review done. I guess we’re usually so excited to start a new level, that the Review session gets truncated prematurely. This time, we covered everything. She got bored after the 30 minute mark and started writing random phrases down. This is what it says:

chase the frog

Mat gulped. He scared the pig, ran to the pond.

Not quite a story but I love that she spelled “chase” correctly and we haven’t covered that yet.

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