If you're interested in spelling, the Megawords research brochure is worth reading. It's a marketing tool, but the research cited jibes with what I found in other sources.

Here's the passage that sold me:

Research has shown that word study is most effective when it is systematically and explicitly taught [sources cited]. Naslund and Samuels (1992) state that "implicitly or incidentally learned behavior that occurs without consciously controlled attention is not as reliably retrieved or consciously controlled as behaviors intentionally learned" (p. 150). They further add that lacking explicit instruction, "many children adopt their own strategies and procedures for word recognition, with some strategies being more accurate and adapted to the reading task than others" (p. 150). . . .

It is during the fourth grade that the adult ability to perceive syllables as units emerges; at this point normal readers begin to perceive syllables more quickly and accurately than single letters" (p. 125). Recognition of this developmental reading/spelling growth of middle school learners underscores the value of a continuing word study program such as MEGAWORDS that emphasizes systematic and explicit teaching of reading and spelling skills for multisyllabic words.

Starting in the 4th grade, Megawords teaches spelling by grouping words according to the syllabication rules of the English language, explicitly teaching the rules, and explicitly teaching & practicing each set of words.

Second Stage Phonics

When I looked into spelling, I realized that our schools seem to teach phonics only up to the point where kids can read. Then they stop.

But there's a second stage of reading and spelling development, which is the point at which kids move from sounding out words via letters to sounding out words via syllables.

If you think about it, it would be virtually impossible to sound out a polysyllabic word letter by letter. You'd get lost in the word.

And in fact, if you ask a normal 4th grader to read a polysyllabic nonsense word, like 'bumret,' he can't do it. I was shocked when I discovered that Christopher, who is an excellent reader, could not read a simple two-syllable nonsense word. It stopped him cold.

One more thing. You read that kids experience a '4th grade slump.' Apparently the slump hits across the board, in all school subjects.

That happened with Christopher. He'd been an excellent reader, reading a couple of years above grade level, and suddenly he didn't want to read any more.

After I learned about the developmental sequence of letters-to-syllables, I began to wonder whether one of the reasons for the 4th grade 'reading slump' (there's a math slump, too) is that we don't teach kids syllables. Just letters.

A few weeks after we started working through Megawords Book 1, Christopher began reading for pleasure again. I don't know whether Megawords had anything to do with it, but I don't know that it didn't, either. We're going to do all 8 books.

For me, Megawords is the SAXON MATH of spelling.


BeingYourChildsFrontalLobes
LiveBloggingTheSpellingBee
GreatMomentsInWorldHistory
SummerSupplementTime
SummerSupplementTimePart2
HowToSpell
HowToSpellPart2
TheSaxonMathOfSpelling
MoreSpelling

-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Jun 2005

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