Teaching Handwriting and Vocabulary Through the Backdoor of Spelling

Many children need help with their spelling, especially if they have problems with dyslexia or other learning disabilities. Additionally, many children need additional help with handwriting. And, teachers are always looking for new ways to bolster their students' vocabularies. However, students can very easily feel infantilized or bored by repetitive exercises, busywork, copywork, and exercises solely devoted to one of these areas. For these reasons, AVKO recommends that short lessons be given. Further, we recommend that lessons serve as double-duty as much as possible. We call this teaching through the "backdoor."

Sequential Spelling is organized in clumps of 4 lessons, where 2-4 word families are taught in each clump. In those 4 lessons, the base words remain the same, but the various derivative forms (declentions) are taught in lessons 2-4 of the clumps. Instead of just teaching each of the lessons "in a vacuum," you can take advantage of the repetition to teach the other facets of language arts: handwriting, vocabulary, keyboarding, dictation, etc.


Teach the first lesson normally. You want the first lesson to be undiluted. Some handwriting practice, vocabulary learning, etc. will occur naturally because of the repetition of the word family patterns and the exposure to new words in their sentence context. We want the students to focus on just spelling the words the first time; let them do what they do automatically.

For the next lessons, you can instruct your student to focus on something additional -- making the strokes of the letters neatly, learning the vocabulary, typing speed and accuracy (you can have them type the words instead of writing them out), etc. As you progress through the lessons in the word family clump, you can divide their attention more as they will require less attention paid to the spelling.

For more tips on customizing Sequential Spelling, please see our Customization page.

Read the Rest of the AVKO Blog | Visit the AVKO Website

Last Chance for the Book of the Month Special

Today is the last day to get your copy of Starting at Square One at a drastically reduced price. The special ends at midnight tonight (the special has been extended to end at midnight of May 1st!). If you need a language arts curriculum for your kindergartner or first grader (K-1), ESL, or older student who needs help with phonemic awareness and/or word attack skills, this is the book for you. As the alphabet is taught, your student will learn reading, spelling, handwriting, and keyboarding. The book uses completely decodable words as the letters of the alphabet are taught.

Learn more about the Book of the Month special and Starting at Square One

Read the Rest of the AVKO Blog | Visit the AVKO Website

A Novel Technique for Teaching Keyboarding

AVKO firmly believes that mistakes are opportunities to learn. In fact, we use this motto in a lot of our materials. Learning keyboarding is no exception. In fact, one has to get past making mistakes while learning to type in order to build up speed and accuracy. So, we have provided you with the instructions of how to temporarily disable the backspace key (replaced with the asterisk [*] symbol) on your computer. So, every time the student pushes the backspace button, an asterisk symbol appears. This method will allow you to re-map a PC's keyboard and change any keys to what you want as well. Note that this method makes global changes -- this will affect every program on the machine until the action is reversed.

Download the PDF Instructions on how to use this free piece of software (KeyTweak) and get started today.

Read the Rest of the AVKO Blog | Visit the AVKO Website