Spelling Curriculum for Sixth Grade (aligned with Common Core)

Over the years, spelling has been put on the back burner. People are convinced that computers can take care of everything, including spelling mistakes. However, some employers use spelling to see if employee candidates have basic skills. In most jobs, basic spelling is needed. In addition, since spelling has been taught less and less, my students’ spelling skills have diminished more and more. Each year, more students come to me not being able to even grasp basic homophones. Moreover, most students couldn’t even decode basic skills because they didn’t comprehend the role that Latin and Greek roots have in our language. Furthermore, oral listening skills have also been diminishing due to the visual world in which we are all now a part.

For all of those reasons, I spent the summer of 2014 and the school year of 2014-2015, creating and testing this curriculum. I wanted to make sure it included, phonics (since some students are ready for it when it is taught at the lower grades), homophones, dictation sentences, review practice, and Latin and Greek roots.

Best of all, three days a week, this entire curriculum is completed in just 6 minutes. (Practice days have 5 minutes of oral partner practice with 1 minute for the Dictation sentence.) The pretest and test days take closer to 10 minutes.)