As I mentioned before, I found Five in a Row (FIAR) at the end of Brian’s kindergarten year. We used it for three years and I loved it!!! My children and I have fond memories of books we rowed (used with FIAR) and my daughter looks forward to using them with her kids one day.

Five in a Row is kind of like a unit study and uses, sort of, a Charlotte Mason approach, if I had to classify it. Basically you pick a child’s picture book from one of the suggested titles (over 60). You get that book from the library, borrow it from someone else, or purchase it yourself. Read through the activities listed in the FIAR manual and pick several that you think will be interesting to your child, yourself or just needs to learn next. Some activities are geared towards the younger children and some towards the older. You’d be amazed at some of the concepts that a younger child can grasp though, so don’t be afraid to do some that you think are more for the older child.

So what you do is take the chosen book, get your kiddos together and snuggle up on a chair or sofa or bed or someplace cozy and read the book to them. Then casually talk about one of the activities you had picked. Maybe you were reading The Bee Tree so you talk about onomatopoeia which is simply words for sounds and this book is full of them. Squeak!

The next day you gather your children together as before and read the book once again. Today you do a different activity. Each book has a story disk which is a small circle with a visual representation of the book on it; place this disk on a wall map on the place where the story takes place. In the case of The Story About Ping, the story disk would be placed in China on the Yangtze River since this story is about a Peking duck on the Yangtze River in China.

Sometimes I found extra activities that I thought looked fun. We made some hand puppets to go with Papa Piccalo. I still have them today, waiting for my future grandchildren to play with them after I read them the delightful story.

Each day, for five days (or more if you choose), you follow the same procedure: cuddle up with your child/children and read the book and then do an activity with it. This along with your phonics/learning to read program and math program is all you need. Young children benefit from lots of play time, nature walks, and learning life skills helping mommy and daddy. This is Five in a Row in its simplest form.

When I used FIAR there were only three volumes. These volumes were written for ages 5-8 but could be stretched to 9 if you have younger children you’re including. Each of the books in these volumes was meant to be covered in one week. There is also a fourth volume which uses a bit more difficult children’s books and are designed to be studied for two weeks instead of just one.

I am a planner, so my first year I worked through the numbers of weeks and the number of books and such and had one planned for each school week (36 weeks). Let me just be the voice of reason here for you! Only plan to do 2-3 books each MONTH. This way you allow for anything that should arise and give yourselves a nice gentle pace. If you find that you have done all that you have “planned” and want another one to do, it is easy to do so.

I suggest that you decide what things are necessary to be accomplished each day. For us it was devotional/Bible story, phonics work, math practice, chores/life skills, and playtime. This way if things happen in the day and you have covered the essentials, you can feel that the day has been successful . . . when we covered FIAR we had a complete day. Many times, that just couldn’t happen because at the time we were rowing I had an infant/toddler.

I do have a warning though, so many extra activities can be found online to go with the delightful stories that you can get yourself bogged down, overwhelmed, and eventually burnt out.

This has gotten long, so I close for now and share why we left FIAR and what we used for the rest of the children’s education.

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

I wish I could share pictures of all of these curricula with you but most of the early ones have been loaned to my sister.

So all my kids were reading but spelling was not their best suit. I found one spelling curriculum at our homeschool support group library; I believe it was called The Natural Speller. I used it a bit but not much because it was using word groups and my experience with Brian and Hooked on Phonics (read about that here).

Next I saw Reading Relex at Mardel on clearance, so I thought we’d give that a try; all the while continuing to look online for some ideas. Reading Reflex helped some but none of us were thrilled with it. It could be very good for kinetic learners because there are “tiles” to move around and spell the words. In truth, I think my kids were really too old for this when I tried it out.

By this point in our journey, we had begun using The Student of the Word as our main curriculum. This had some instruction for spelling included so we tried that for a while. I was using some dictation but really did not understand the real way to do dictation and how it encompasses spelling. All the while, any time I heard of a spelling program while perusing my homeschooling forums, I would look into them.

Then I heard about Spell to Write and Read (which is the revised version of The Writing Road to Reading – I think.) This method made so much sense to me because the child is taught all the sounds each phoneme makes – e.g. “ck” has 3 sounds ch as in church, kkk as in character, and sh as in chef. Now remember, I  was using this with older children that already knew how to read, not teaching them to read using this curriculum. Here is a link to more information about the program. (At one time they had a yahoo group for people to investigate the curriculum but I don’t know if it still exists.)

This program teaches the child spelling rules and they create a spelling book with rules and words they study that follow those rules are added to the rule page. There is a huge teacher learning curve with this one but I really really liked it, my kids, not so much – mostly because they liked to get school work done as quickly as possible so they could get on to doing things they wanted to do. We used this program for about a year or so.

In the end, when I saw words that the children had misspelled, I had them write it correctly 10 times on notebook paper or in a composition book, so that they would cement the proper spelling in their minds (visually and muscle memory).

To be honest, on this long road to spelling proficiency, I’m not sure which of the programs “worked”. I think it could be like I once heard about reading programs . . . the one that works for you and your child is the one that you use last. Ultimately, I think it all played a roll in their development.

This is why it is hard for me to make a recommendation for any one reading or spelling program. When teaching my kids to read, my goal was to get them to where they were reading books or any other written material that they came across. I wasn’t concerned about spelling at that time because it seemed that it could take much longer to get to where they were reading books and not just readers and I needed to act while the desire was there. Today, two of my children love the dictionary app and love words and the other doesn’t seem to be hindered at all either; so I think they turned out alright.

{I do have to say that I am currently intrigued with the new programs for primary children that Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) has available.}

Well, that is our journey through spelling. What a winding road! Next week I’ll talk about the curriculum I used throughout the majority of my children’s homeschooling years.

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº