Experience with Spelling Mastery? How compares with AVKO

I have looked at the AVKO site, may be buying the guide and using it when I get students who need that particular level. I’ve also read some posts here from people who use it.
It sounds like your school is *not* aplying the AVKO program as it is meant to be used. The student is *not* supposed to have to study 25 words a night, quite the contrary. The whole idea of AVKO, as I understand it, is to learn sound-spelling patterns and learn to spell automatically *without* memorization of individual words; memorizing the words as your school is doing totally defeats the purpose.
And when you say the program is taking so much time and is taking away from the reading — that sounds odd too. The idea of AVKO, as I understand it, is to spend five or ten minutes daily practicing one pattern to mastery. Short, focused practice is more effective than prolonged attempts to memorize everything. In a classroom, what with passing papers around and so on, it may take more time, but not more than fifteen minutes a day.

I’ve seen a similar pattern with other programs; the program is based on a different philosophy from what the teacher learned so the teacher teaches the old philosophy while waving a hand at the books from the new program. If the teacher’s philosophy is effective and the new books aren’t (as teachers who use phonics anyway even with poor reading materials) this can be a good thing; if the teacher’s philosophy doesn’t work and the new books were meant as an improvement (as in the old style ritualistic spelling lists versus an analytic method like AVKO) then the new program “fails” — well actually it doesn’t fail, it was never implemented in the first place.

What grade level is your daughter and do you have any idea at what reading and spelling levels she tests?

I just got the first couple of levels of AVCO and did not particularly feel the words were very appropriate for elementary children.

Janis

My child is in 5th grade. She is going to be tested in a month, so I’d like to see the results, as school and tutor have 2 different ideas of what reading level my child is. She is working with prefixes and suffixes with her reading tutor. She seems to be able to read the AVKO words and I think the program has helped her with reading multisyllable words. It seems like my daughter will be mainly taught by educational assistants at school so I will need to work hard on creating specific IEP goals to help my child and I was hoping to find a program that would be easy for them to implement.

I have used AVKO with my child and like it a lot. I used it for about six months before I gave in to his whining about doing two different spelling programs. It helped him learned to see patterns in words so that he could do class spelling lists. I plan to do it again this summer.

You are not supposed to study the words but, as Victoria says, just do it. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes a day. That is all we spent on it.

It does require a third to fourth grade reading level. I tried the program first at the beginning of third grade. My son was probably 2.5. The words got too hard too fast. We did it successfully at the end of fourth grade with a reading level of 4-4.5.

Beth

What is AVKO? my daughter is 6 and in Kindergarten and is have a very tough time with letter sounds and names They tested her and said she has trouble with memory recall how it was explained to me was her mind is like a file cabenit, and she can open the right drawer but, she has trouble pulling out the right file. We are new to this and trying to get all the information we can in order to help develop her IEP we have a meeting May 18 any ideas or info would be appreciated.

amommy,

Look on this site under LD In Depth and read articles under Reading. It will tell you names of appropriate reading programs. AVCO is a spelling program for older elementary and above. You need to look at reading programs like Phono-Graphix, Lindamood-bell, Wilson, Language!, etc.

Janis