lavender mom

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Quote:
Originally Posted by lavender mom
It's a fairly inexpensive program, as phonics programs go. All you really need is the book, The Writing Road To Reading and the phonogram cards. You might be able to find a copy of the book and see if it's a good fit for you. (I do think it might be hard to implement without some training. It's pretty complicated.) Slingerland is also supposed to be similar to Spalding. If I remember right, they both "evolved" from the Orton-Gillingham (sp) Method.




Yeah, I was looking at their website last night, just to sort of refresh my memory and I was surprised at all the things they had in their packages. The leveled readers are new. I thought Romalda Spalding was anti-leveled readers and thought kids should be reading "quality literature." I can't compare the two editions of TWRTR. I haven't even picked up my copy in 8 years.

The notebooks they sell as part of their kits are just blank composition books. The pink ones have wider lines for younger writers but we used regular composition books starting in 2nd grade and they worked fine. The McCall Harby/McCall Crabb booklets are useful, but not essential imo. They have passages to read and then multiple choice questions for comprehension. You could find similar things in almost any reading comprehension workbook you picked up at Barnes and Noble. I never used any of the other items they put in their kits- I think that might have been part of the "level 2 program" that we didn't really use at our school. The phonogram CD would be helpful if you're just starting out because Spalding is pretty picky about the way the phonograms are pronounced. But other than that, I think a copy of TWRTR & a stack of phonograms cards could take you a pretty far.

Edited to add:Looking at the website once more, I think the other thing I might get if were just starting out would be the Spelling video they list on this page:
http://spalding.org/store/av_products.php

The way they teach the words is one of the things that I think makes Spalding so unique. It's pretty different, and would be a lot harder to understand without having actually seen it.