A Family Approach to Spelling: A Review of Spelling and Vocabulary Family Textbook from Love at Home Education

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For many homeschooling families, there are multiple age levels who need to be taught together. Finding materials that can meet the needs of kindergarten to high school students has been made simpler with Love at Home Education. There are a variety of products from short unit studies to fuller curriculum that will enable you to teach your youngest and oldest children together. In this review, I will be discussing the K-12 Vocabulary and Spelling Curriculum from Love at Home Education.

What Do You Get?

You can choose from a PDF or a combination of both Print and PDF copies. We received the 79-page full color PDF for the purposes of this review.

Monthly Themes

• Neighborhood
• Space
• Community
• Nature
• World
• Family
• Weather
• Transportation
• Animals 

When you receive your copy of the K-12 Vocabulary and Spelling Curriculum Family Textbook you will need to decide at which level your children will be working. You will be able to choose from four levels. There are three suggestions for games and activities that will help your homeschooling children with writing skills as well as learning vocabulary and practicing spelling.  And then there are six suggestions for active games and activities to help with learning vocabulary and spelling. You will need to prepare for these games and activities prior to your lesson.

Each month consists of four weeks of weekly stories, suggestion for weekly study, games and study help ideas, spelling words, and vocabulary words. If you choose to do the games and study help idea suggestions, you will need to prepare your own pre-test and test, word searches, fill-in-the blanks and other materials to fill out your weekly studies.

How We Used the Spelling and Vocabulary Family Textbook

Summer time for us means a lighter workload for our teen but we still continue with our younger two children. The Textbook suggests a five-day schedule for the entire family starting with reading the weekly story and administering pre-tests to introducing chosen vocabulary and working on spelling activities and games. Finally, there will be a review and you can administer a spelling test on day five if you wish.

We skipped past the Neighborhood theme to the Space theme since our younger two children are studying astronomy. The first week's story asks you to imagine you are traveling through space and use some of the vocabulary that will be introduced such as oxygen, solar system, comet, and asteroid. 

The vocabulary words are broken up into four categories: 

1. Novice
2. Competent
3. Advanced
4. Proficient 

The Textbook provides you with information to determine where your children fall so you know which words to focus upon each week. Our two younger children will be looking at mostly the novice words but we will be discussing some of the others as they fit into their science curriculum. For example, later on in the year they will be talking about asteroids, comets, and constellations but these words fall in the competent and proficient categories. And we have already talked about satellites which falls in the advanced category. So, as with most homeschooling curriculum and tools, you can adapt this for your own families' needs.

As we are using this with two younger children, I wrote the words on index cards for them to practice reading and our small white board. This would allow us the opportunity for our six-year-old to copy the words to practice penmanship and spelling.

Do you want to learn more about Love at Home Education?

"Love at Home Education – A Dinner-table friendly, all-inclusive family curriculum; that your high schooler, kindergartner can learn together on their own levels."

Love at Home Education offers both secular and faith-based curriculum for preschool to 12th grade so you will be sure to find something that meets the needs of your homeschooling family.

If you want to see a sample of the K-12 Vocabulary and Spelling Curriculum, check out the gallery at Love at Home Education. You will be able to see the first month's words and recommended activities.

In the past we have reviewed Natural Disasters K-12 Unit Study, Thomas Jefferson Unit Study (K-6), and George Washington Unit Study (K-6) from Love at Home Education.

How do you spell a great lesson plan? Schoolhouse Spelling!

This post contains affiliate links. For more information please see my Terms of Use and Disclosure Policy page. Thank you.

Struggling with finding a way to meet the spelling needs of your child?  Are there too many lists and words and you don't know where to start? Schoolhouseteachers.com offers Schoolhouse Spelling to its members with options from Preschool to High School.  

Schoolhouse Spelling offers Preschool Spelling (40 weeks of age-appropriate words), Lower Elementary Spelling (two years of material), Upper Elementary Spelling (four years of material), Middle School Spelling (four years of material), and High School Spelling (four years of material).

My four year old and I have started working through the Preschool Spelling which includes video flash cards of the weekly words and worksheets to practice the words of the week.  It is designed to help students learn letter sounds and form words.

The first week reviews 'at' words such as cat, hat and rat.  We also made other 'at' words including bat, sat, and mat. In week two, words: bat, mat, sat, and fat will be discussed and practiced. 

As my son likes to practice writing, we wrote the words on the white board and on scrap paper for him to practice. During the activity, my daughter also wanted her own list of words and drew her own pictures to go along with her brother.  

The week's activities continue with the student drawing a picture of a cat, a hat, and a rat each day while tracing the word.  

My son's cat.

I found these lessons to be a great introduction to spelling.  Both my four year old son and my two year old daughter can review the words together and practice sounds.  

The other levels will be just as valuable as they meet the needs of more advanced learners.  In the Lower Elementary Grades, students can practice correcting misspelled words and rhyming among other activities. There are also options at the different levels to approach the spelling via a phonics based style or a Charlotte Mason style.  They can be used independently or together (one following the other).  The lessons also approach the course from a Biblical Worldview offering Bible quotations to learn new spelling words.