Spelling Works

After more than thirty years of teaching writing skills and developing his own unique mechanics exercises at a top New York school, Jim Halverson decided to share his successful methods with a wider audience. The result is Spelling Works, a book that makes the difficult task of English orthography both engaging and fun. As Halverson says, "Every teacher knows the inefficiency of teaching spelling by rote memorization. The kids study for the quizzes, do well on them, and then misspell many of the same words the next day in their own writing." To involve students, he created exercises that are each part of an ongoing story, and at the end of each unit they review the new concept with games and a "spelling maze." An added benefit of exercises that are stories is that the students also learn better proofreading skills as they scan sentences for misspellings.