Teaching Spelling: The Phonic Zoo & SWR

We started working with The Phonetic Zoo cards and CD from Institute For Excellence in Writing. It has been a great success. It's even better, though, now that I'm combining the spelling lessons with the SWR (Spell to Write and Read) phonogram cards.

I did find, though, that there was not enough explanation for different spelling rules, as there is in SWR. So I now use both. I select all the relevant SWR phonogram cards that apply to the spelling words of the day, we review them and I leave them up whilst we go through the words. It has made a huge difference!

Along with this, I use Earthschooling's "Sixth Sense Reading" ebook, which has lots of silly sentences using various phonogram groups. And on joy-of-reading.com I found more word groups based on phonograms.