reporting back

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Home : 2002 : January : 12

reporting back
By Samantha

Well, we had our Cast-a-Spell training yesterday, and I have to agree I was very impressed! Also, at the end of the day, we voted almost unanimously to insitutute the program in our school. The premise is that you engage
all children as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners, and that you are teaching them (and making them use) strategies, visulatization, sub-modality coding, sound chunks, and patterns, rather than memorize isolated word lists and then forgetting them after the test. Instead, assessment is in daily dictation sentences and daily writing performance. Children are taught to "be a spelling

genius" and "run their own brains." Once a sight word or skill is taught and considered mastered, it is removed (will eventually reappear in review section and can be re-added if found it was not mastered) from your daily lesson and students are held accountable for it in all daily writing.
We each left with an EXCELLENT training manual, which outlines all procedures, how to introduce and get kids excited/invested in the program, word lists, specific lessons, etc. The program works skill words, content area words, and sight words.

The 2 women who started the program led our training, and everything they said made a lot of sense. The energy level in the room was also amazing! Just reading this post will not fully explain the program to you or do it justice. It's somewhat difficult to imagine, but if you do have the opportunity, I would encourage you to at least observe someone teaching with it-- it is very impressive!

I agree with other posts that the training is necessary and parents need to be educated. The philosophy is written out in a very understandable way in the manual. Those teachers in our building who piloted the program this year all passed out photocopies of this page at Open House, and have not had any parent complaints. In fact, many parents are excited about it-- I have 2 students with siblings in those rooms, and both sets of parents have apoken highly of it and asked when my class will get to start cast-a-spell! I know many parents like the security of the Friday spelling test system and feel like practicing those words with their is something they know how to do for them. Many others, of course, either just don't or sigh in relief that they don't have to do it anymore. Parents in our pilot rooms adjusted quickly, however, and practicing math facts for timed tests can easily take the place of spelling words, while freeing up some valuable class time! We also did a grade level wide sight-word assessment the week after the holiday vacation, and the children in the pilot classroom did much better on it.

Cast-a-spell is a big undertaking and you need to be invested in it. It's a 20-30 minute time commitment each day, but then you don't need other things, like spelling homework, etc. It is high energy (for both teacher and students), but from all accounts I've heard, the children enjoy it. The strategies also apply to other areas as well.
As a teacher, I am very excited about the program and would encourage you all to at least check it out. It embraced everything I learned in college about traditional spelling programs not working, and fixed it. If nothing else, check out their website and maybe send for the demo video.

I know this has been a very long rambling post. I'm sorry-- people asked for my information and I have tried to condense and provide it as much as possible. I don't know if what I wrote will make any sense since you haven't been to the workshop, and I didn't mean to sound like a commercial. The basic essence is I like the idea of the program I hope this helps!