The Homeschool How To
I don't claim to know anything about homeschooling, so I set out on a journey to ask the people who do! Join me as I chat with homeschoolers to discuss; "why are people homeschooling," "what are all the ways people are using to homeschool today," and ultimately, "should I homeschool my kids?"
The Homeschool How To
Curriculum Series: All About Spelling
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The Homeschool How To Curriculum Series
Access to Curriculum SeriesSpelling and reading may seem inextricably linked, but as homeschool mom Carolyn reveals, they actually engage different cognitive processes. While her third grader could fluently read chapter books, his writing remained stubbornly phonetic until they discovered All About Spelling.
This compact, powerful curriculum tackles the specific challenge of encoding words—translating sounds into written letters—through brief, daily lessons that deliver remarkable results. Carolyn walks us through exactly what these 10-minute sessions look like: introducing spelling patterns using color-coded magnetic tiles, carefully sequenced word lists, and simple dictation exercises. The tactile-to-written approach helps children internalize rules they might otherwise miss when simply reading.
What makes this program particularly appealing is its efficiency and flexibility. With just 24 lessons per level, families can progress quickly without sacrificing mastery. The curriculum works beautifully as a standalone spelling program or can complement All About Reading for a comprehensive language arts approach. Most importantly, Carolyn shares the tangible improvement she's witnessed—her son now remembers that pesky silent E and applies spelling patterns consistently in his writing.
Whether you're struggling with a child who reads beautifully but spells phonetically, or simply exploring curriculum options for your homeschool journey, this episode provides valuable insights into a proven approach that transforms young writers with minimal daily time investment. Follow Carolyn's homeschooling adventures on Instagram at @unboxedlearningathome and discover how this "outside the box" approach might benefit your family too.
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Welcome to the Homeschool How-To Find my Curriculum, a series where we talk all about curriculum. I've been interviewing homeschooling families for over a year now on my main podcast, the Homeschool How-To, but I really wanted to zero in on curriculum. There's so much out there. How do I know what would work best for me and my child? How do I know what works for one child would work for the other? I might like the curriculum I'm using now, but how do I know there's not a better one out there, especially if I don't know all the curriculums. And what about supplemental curriculum? Should I be using that too? This series is to help you decide just that. I'm going to interview parents who are using all the curriculums so that you can decide the absolute best way to unfold your homeschooling journey. The absolute best way to unfold your homeschooling journey.
Speaker 1:Welcome, carolyn. You are going to chat with us today about all about spelling. How are you? I'm good. How are you Good? Good. So we already chatted once about hopefully I released that already the math with confidence for the kindergarten and third grade level. So now we're going to talk to you about your experience with all about spelling. And I've used the all about reading, pre-reading, so that's in the same company, I assume, yes, okay, so I'm just going to let you kind of tell us you're in the kindergarten and the third grade level. Now, I don't know that there was even an all about spelling for kindergarten. What grade does that start at?
Speaker 2:So similar to all about reading. They're called different levels, so level one, level two, level three, and the levels don't necessarily match up with the grade level. Levels don't necessarily match up with the grade level. They're more based on your child's skills and probably, since you're familiar with All About Reading, you'll know there's a little test you can do that's free on the All About Learning website and you can kind of gauge which level your child should start at. Okay, so for all about spelling, I am only using this with my oldest, I haven't used it with my youngest, so we started when my oldest was seven with this curriculum.
Speaker 1:Okay, Okay, great. Now do you use it in conjunction with other? All about learning products as well.
Speaker 2:So you can. You can use it hand in hand, you can do all about reading and all about spelling and they kind of coincide In our case. What I did is I've actually used all about reading reading first with my oldest because for him he needed work on his fluency and I knew that All About Reading was a great program for that, so it creates more of a fluent reader and he was able to decode the words and so on and so forth. But when it came to spelling and writing, everything was very phonetic. You know when a young child writes you something and they write it very phonetically and you can understand what they say, but it is spelled completely wrong. So what he needed to work with was encoding, and that is what all about spelling focuses on. Is encoding the word. So writing, yeah, it's actually very. I found it so interesting because decoding the reading and encoding the writing is very different, but you can work together so I guess I would have to look this.
Speaker 1:Uh, but you might know, though, the all about reading does. Does that? How many levels is that? I think there's about four or five levels. Oh, okay, so you would. If you wanted to do this, you would do them side by side if those were the two you know, products that you picked, curriculums that you picked for your kid. Okay, you could, I see that, but you don't have to. You can use all about spelling for, like the handwriting, and then a different reading program if you chose to. Yes, and is that what you do?
Speaker 2:Yes, is that?
Speaker 1:what I'm getting at.
Speaker 2:I right now we're. We were more focused on spelling, because the reading is already there, on spelling, because the reading is already there.
Speaker 1:Okay, so if they kind of master the read, yes, right, he's mastered the fluency.
Speaker 2:Right, he can read chapter books. But when it comes to spelling, it's used as a totally different part of the brain and it involves more revisiting the basic phonetic lessons to sort of master those skills and know how to spell words correctly.
Speaker 1:That's interesting, you know. I guess I hadn't ever really thought about that. Like there are two different subjects, the reading and the spelling. But as you, once you know how to read, you kind of you know, I mean you can be introduced into more words, but that is kind of the spelling part of it. It is so overwhelming. I mean you would think, okay, if I'm going to just start homeschooling a third grader, I need reading, I need spelling, I need math, I need science, I need history, I need you know music, and it's like you might not need it all at the same time, especially if they're not all full year curriculum. So how many lessons are in the all about spelling curriculum for third grade? There are 24. It's very quick, 24. And you're, you're at the level. Is it level three? Is that what they?
Speaker 2:call it. Yes, yes, level three he's working on right now.
Speaker 1:Okay, and so there's 24 lessons. How long does each lesson take to complete? Are they one day or more?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's very fast. It's about 10 minutes. It's much faster than the all about reading lesson.
Speaker 1:So if there's only 24 lessons, you could essentially be done with this in like a month, yep.
Speaker 2:It's a skill that really builds on each other, on itself, quickly, and you can pump through a lot of the levels as quickly as you want.
Speaker 1:Can you give me a day-to-day of what it would look like you sitting down with your son to complete this curriculum?
Speaker 2:Yep for sure. So each lesson begins with introducing a new sound, a vowel team or a rule that you'll be learning that day, and you would either have the magnetic letter board set up or you would use the All About Learning Tile app. It's a letter tile app. I prefer the letter tile app because it means you're not going to miss any tiles, they're not going to go missing around your house and you don't need to reorganize it after your child spells a word. So then there is a word list that's associated with each lesson and then your child would spell those words with the tiles and they're color-coded. So your vowels are red and your consonants are blue and your vowel teams are this and it's all all different color coding and they would spell it with the tiles and then after they would use just a regular notebook and they would spell it with a pencil and they would write out the words. You would dictate it to them, and then there are different phrases and sentences that you would also be dictating as well, and that's it.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's a lesson Nice. Does your child enjoy the lesson?
Speaker 2:Sometimes. Yes, he enjoys that, it is quick, he understands. He's at the age where he understands the importance of this skill. He's at the age where he understands the importance of this skill. But when it comes to hey, would you rather play lego or would you rather do spelling? Um, obviously, the lego would. It does help if I have a visual, let's say a list of hey today. I, this morning, I need you to work on we're going to work on some math and some spelling, and then you will have free time.
Speaker 1:So did you do an earlier, like a level two or level one of spelling? For All About Spelling, we did Okay, and what age did you start that at?
Speaker 2:He's eight. Yeah, so we did it at about seven. There was some. We had some gaps in between. It was very quick to go through and I have I have noticed an improvement, a lot, on his spelling ability. You know he's remembering the silent E on the end of the word, like where before he would write it without it. So it's like what I talked about before the decoding he can read the word. He knows that l-i-k-e is like, but when it came to writing that e was always just forgotten all the time, and so this repetition and these lessons have really helped solidify that.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's, yeah, that's great. That's something I've never really thought about either is like, yeah, you can read the word, but it doesn't mean you can spell the word, and that's interesting, and so you don't overlap the two, which is nice that you are kind of still getting reading while you're doing the spelling lesson, but it's just a more concentration in the spelling and the writing of it versus, yeah, doing the reading portion. I like that. So could you do this with more than one child at a time if you had, say, two that were around the same age, or is this a better one-on-one?
Speaker 2:If they were around the same age, I would be doing the exact same lesson with both of them. If I had a six and seven year old, I would be doing the same lesson. I have a five and an eight year old and that doesn't work out at all.
Speaker 1:How about saving this curriculum for your younger child? Is that possible?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, because there's no workbook, it's literally just a textbook, and then they would use their own notebook, gotcha.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's good. Well, that is very good to know, Is there anything that sets this curriculum apart from other spelling curriculums that you had looked into? What made you choose this one?
Speaker 2:This one was recommended to me from a friend through a friend, and she was a large advocate for the all about reading. So I had used all about reading and I really liked the technique and so I wanted to continue that same learning style and that's why I went with All About Spelling. There's a whole deep, dark rabbit hole that you can go down when it comes to, like children, reading and phonics and so on, and I really like the science of reading approach and I find, in terms of an open and go curriculum, all about spelling, all about reading, is one that follows that.
Speaker 1:I'm curious but I don't want another rabbit hole to go down. But I think I've almost lost my way a few times. But yeah, I find that interesting because I started out like I don't know what to do and I got kind of a recommendation to do all about reading the pre-reading, but then also to add this Hagerty phonics thing book that is used in actual schools. And I had done that for, let's see, July, August, September, October, November, five months. I was doing both of them like back to back.
Speaker 1:My poor kid was. It was awful, Like it was just torment to him because it was just so much. And so school, like he did like the all about reading, like when we got to the fun stuff, the haggerty stuff was just not fun for him at all but it was really. It was cool for me to see how we break apart the words and the rhyming part and and I do think it helped him in the long run. And then I did a completely different curriculum over christmas time. I did like, uh, it was all about Christmas from the treehouse schoolhouse, a connected Christmas.
Speaker 1:And so that kind of broke things up. And then now, uh, for January I had started I kind of like I we were almost done with the all about reading, pre-reading, and then I totally switched to teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons, because I was just curious about it. So I'm like, well, we can always go back and finish the few lessons that we have in the all about reading, but I was curious to see if you really can teach them to read in 100 easy lessons. So we've been doing that now for like two months.
Speaker 2:It's so funny because there's, like you said, there's so many different curriculums out there and I think it's okay to switch If you're not. If something's not working for you, then you do need to switch, and I can see teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons. I've heard fantastic information about that and I think it can definitely work for some children. And then there's other kids who need more handholding, and programs like All About Reading really help with that. So I think it's just about you know figuring out your child and what they like and what works for them and a lot of that. You end up buying so much curriculum or looking at it, especially at the beginning, and then sort of as you go, you get a really good idea on what works for your child and what doesn't work for your child, and what your values are and what you want to focus your day-to-day life on.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and that's why I started doing this curriculum series, because I'm like, yeah, how do you know unless you hear at least what the day-to-day looks like and what they're learning overall? How do you know what to pick? So hopefully, if anything, I'm going to learn a lot. So hopefully I'm helping other people along the way. Now the all about spelling. Hopefully I'm helping other people along the way. Now the all about spelling. This is not religious right. This one is secular as well. It's secular, okay, anything that you didn't like about it In an ideal world.
Speaker 2:I would love to see all about reading and all about spelling connected in one textbook so it covers both. You get the spelling and you get the reading fluency as well.
Speaker 1:Okay, so it's possible to combine the two, but it's just, it's not like your lesson is going to overlap with them, correct, okay?
Speaker 2:You know how there are readers with All About Reading Like the little blurb.
Speaker 1:The yeah okay, yes, yes, maybe you're oh yeah, storybooks with the zigzag zebra and yeah, yes, yes.
Speaker 2:So all about spelling will have a little, you know, a little box on each page saying, if you have the level two, all about reading storybooks. You can read this story and this story and it's the same words that you are learning to spell that would be found in the storybook.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's good to know. So right now you're not doing an actual like reading curriculum, you're just is like just us reading together at bedtime. That is our reading. Yes, I'm not doing an actual like reading curriculum, you're just is is like just us reading together at bedtime.
Speaker 2:That is our reading yes, um, I'm not doing an actual reading curriculum, because we've made it to the point where his fluency is good and he has the confidence and will read his own books on his own. And I mean I'll tell you I didn't know if I'd ever get there, but we did and it's been really great. I still will get him to read aloud something because it really helps with fluency.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nobody ever made me read aloud when I was younger. I think that was very detrimental. They should have. Yeah, nobody ever made me read aloud when I was younger. I think that was very detrimental. They should have. Yeah, it's so important. Yeah, well, I'll fix it with my son.
Speaker 2:But is there anything?
Speaker 1:else that you wanted to add about that, or maybe that I forgot to ask, or anything that you wanted to add about the All About Spelling curriculum. I think I've added most of it. Okay, any other supplemental stuff that you feel that people should add to it or that you've added to it Other than, like you said you read, have them do some read-alouds.
Speaker 2:I would say if you could use the storybooks from the All About Reading curriculum to add on top of the spelling, that would be good.
Speaker 1:Ideal, perfect. And then where can people find you, carolyn, because I know that you post on Instagram about your journey.
Speaker 2:You can find me on Instagram at unboxedlearningathome. Oh I love it Unboxed. That's right. I like to think outside of the box. That's why we're doing it right.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Oh, thank you so much, Carolyn. Hopefully you will come back on the Homeschool how To podcast and tell us all about what got you into homeschooling so you can hear the journey from the beginning.
Speaker 2:That would be great. Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Please consider sharing this podcast or my main podcast, the Homeschool how To with friends, family, on Instagram or in your favorite homeschool group Facebook page. The more this podcast is shared, the longer we can keep it going and the more hope we have for the future. Thank you for your love of the next generation. Thank you.