[00:00:00] Gretchen: We really do listen to our customers. If you’ve ever worked with a company that doesn’t listen to your customers, how frustrating it can be. I love the fact that we had gathered feedback for a very long time. Parents said that they wanted to see some things change. It was a privilege to be a part of that change process.

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[00:00:25] Amber Didden: Hello. My name is Amber Didden. I’m your host for our webinar today. Our session title is Elevate Your Learning, Explore Spelling, Use These Latest Innovations. I have the privilege of interviewing Gretchen. Gretchen’s our regular host. I get to step in and turn the tables today. Welcome to our webinar. Gretchen, would you like to introduce yourself to the audience for those that might be joining us for the first time?

[00:00:51] Gretchen: I’m delighted to welcome everybody to The Demme Learning Show. Yes, we have flipped the script today. The reason we’re doing that is because I am Demme Learning’s subject matter expert for Spelling You See. I was delightedly involved in the second edition of Spelling You See. We really want to share what a collaborative effort it was. I am here today to talk about that experience and what the changes will mean for you if you are a user or a new user. I’m delighted to have Amber host me. She’s a podcast veteran. This is going to be fun.

[00:01:28] Amber: You’re very generous. It is nice to be back in the podcast seat. I’ve done a little podcasting in the past. It’s fun to be here again. Before we really dive into it, I wanted to share a little bit of my experience with Spelling You See because maybe it’s a little bit different. I have been working with Demme Learning for about a year and a half now. I was homeschooled myself, growing up, off and on a little bit. I have two kids. My oldest is 14 years old and my youngest is 12. As long as they’ve been in school, they’ve been in public school because we have a great public school system where I live, and so we’ve been blessed to have them involved in public school.

My youngest was just learning to write and spell and read when we hit the pandemic of 2020. As everybody knows, a lot of those public school kids got sent home to learn. It was a crazy time. I was working full-time from home and my kids were trying to do Zoom school. Unfortunately, we just got behind and we’re in a deficit, especially when it came to spelling. For the last few years, we’ve really been trying to help them the best that we could and pull them along, but every time we had a parent-teacher conference, it was something that came up with his teachers.

Last year when we started working on the Spelling You See updates, we got advanced copies to review, and so I snuck one home and said, what if I tested this out with Levi, my son? We did, we started taking a crack at it. Immediately, he was interested and invested. We started in the Americana level, went through placement and decided that that was the best place for him, and really started seeing improvement pretty quickly. We finished the Americana book and have moved on to the next level, and he’s doing great. It’s been really neat to use it as a supplement in that way and learn about it in a hands-on experience, and to see the results as well.

Gretchen, you know that customer feedback is a very important part of what we do at Demme Learning. We’re always looking to our customers to hear from them and what they need and what they’re experiencing. Spelling You See was no exception to that rule. We implemented a pilot program. Can you tell us more about the pilot program, how it worked, what we learned, and then how that customer feedback influenced the final product?

[00:03:59] Gretchen: The one thing that I have loved for the 11 years that I’ve been here at Demme Learning is we really do listen to our customers. If you’ve ever worked with a company that doesn’t listen to your customers, how frustrating it can be. I love the fact that we had gathered feedback for a very long time and parents said that they wanted to see some things change. It was a privilege to be a part of that change process.

Spelling You See debuted 11 years ago and we thought we had a really good product. We did, but we also were bringing a brand new product to market that we thought we had explained everything well to. You know how it is when you think you’ve explained it, but then you have the opportunity to find out better explanations could be made. It gets a little weird. We had the ability to ask our customers to formally collaborate with us. We thought if we could get a couple of folks to help us in the reiteration process for the second edition, it would be really good.

We had some ideas of some things we wanted to do, but we were excited to get parents to help us out. We got over 200 parents to help us out. Parents love the program and man, it was very exciting to me to get to see all the commentary that came in as the parents just drove the program. We made some changes in the middle of the process because we were hearing some things that needed further clarification, and that was awesome. That was really a terrific experience. I can’t say enough about that collaborative process. It’s a privilege to work for a company that really does that.

[00:05:49] Amber: I agree. One of the neat things too, I thought, was that we didn’t just send the product and say, hey, take a look at it, try a couple lessons and let us know. We really walked with the parents step by step as they implemented it with their students. Like you said, I think we gained a lot of really important insights because we were moving along through the process with them.

[00:06:10] Gretchen: They gave us feedback after the 1st lesson, the 8th lesson, the 12th lesson, and then when they were halfway through the program, and then we got to have round-table discussions with them to get their real feelings. When you send out a survey, you think you’re asking the question, but to get to talk to someone is a whole different experience. That was pretty cool too.

[00:06:33] Amber: Very cool. I want to ask you next about the DNA of Spelling You See. Spelling You See is a research-backed program that really focuses on the developmental stages of spelling. Can you elaborate on why that approach is important?

[00:06:51] Gretchen: Absolutely. One of the things I think that is really important to understand is as a society, we have made the misapprehension that if you read well, you can spell. 67% of Americans report being hesitant spellers. How did we get there? Because they don’t report being hesitant readers. Reading and spelling are actually opposites. In the reading process, this is what we do. We decode. The better we read, the faster we decode.

An adept reader may look as many as eight words before and eight words after to figure out and parse a word they don’t know. Then they pull context cues and they just keep on reading. It seems, you know the more you read, the easier it is to read? That’s what happens in the reading process. The spelling process is the opposite of that. In the spelling process, we encode. We have to think about a word. We have to think about how that word is formed. Then we have to deliver on that formation. My example here is the word “phone”. I’m thinking about how to spell phone.

English is so crazy. There’s nine different phonemes that can make the three phonemes sound of phone, so it becomes really nuts when you’re trying to figure out, but there’s only one right spelling. How do I do that? That is the heart of the difference, is that spelling is a visual process. We need to make that visual process doable for kids. That’s what really makes spelling different. This is also based on materials from the McGuffey Institute.

If you’ve been around homeschooling for any length of time, McGuffey readers were one of the original homeschoolers. In fact, Laura Ingalls Wilder read them. The McGuffey Institute at the University of Virginia found that there is a series of steps that every adept speller goes through. We took that research and we based Spelling You See on those series of steps. We start with children, as they emerge, they learn to write their names. They may get a little bit creative. They write it in all uppercase letters. Where Spelling You See really begins is the aspect of phonemic awareness and the fact that letters make sounds together make words.

We work with kindergartners, kids who have not yet emerged as readers but really want to learn to read. We work with them in the sound-to-letter correspondence of experiencing cat. Instead of spelling it C-A-T, we pronounce it. We say Ku-ah-ti. That helps us begin the process. The other thing that Spelling You See does, which is really important, is it’s a developmentally appropriate amount of time.

You’re looking at with a kindergartner who’s just beginning the program a maximum of 10 minutes a day. Then we step into nursery rhymes. Nursery rhymes are amazing because they give us an enormous amount of wordplay in a very small space and they also give us vocabulary and rhyme and alliteration, all those things. A generation ago, we kicked Mother Goose to the curb and we probably shouldn’t have because there’s a study out of the University of England in Brighton that says that a child that has learned three nursery rhymes before they begin to read is twice as likely to read on grade level by the time they are what they call term three, third grade, which is pretty exciting.

Then we work on into what we call the skill development stage. That’s the longest stage, it’s the toughest, it’s where the rubber meets the road. You have to go from the phonics of learning to spell and listening to the visual of thinking of a pattern. The reason it gets crazy is because English is derived from so many other languages. In fact, the more letters a word has, the less likely it is to be spelled as it sounds. That becomes a little bit bananas. It’s a wonder any of us learn to spell.

[00:11:22] Amber: Talk about this a little bit later on in our conversation. Those stages of development are really what drives our placement process and what makes it so important to use our placement tool to know where to start with your student and how far they’ve come and where they are in those phases.

[00:11:39] Gretchen: That was one of the things we went through in the second iteration of Spelling You See is we realized that we needed the placement tool to be more interactive and a little bit more intuitive. It has become that. You can find it on spellingyousee.com. You can get to spellingyousee.com through demmelearning.com. We’re even going to include a link to the placement tool in the show notes. That’ll be really helpful.

[00:12:06] Amber: Perfect. You mentioned something while you were talking about spelling being a very visual practice. What does that mean for students with dyslexia?

[00:12:17] Gretchen: I’m so glad that you asked me that question. We had a lot of registrants who ask about dyslexia. I have two children with dyslexia. They happen to be the two kids that I use the program with. One of the things I think that is really important to recognize is we have been sold a myth in this country that says dyslexics can’t memorize, and dyslexics can’t spell. If you go through a process that allows you to bring as many senses to the table as possible, it facilitates spelling. It’s really interesting. Most spelling programs use lists of words. The problem with the list of words is your brain treats that as what is known to researchers as item memory.

Once the urgency to retain that list subsides, then so does the list, which is why there’s probably a bunch of parents who are going to watch this and say, I have a kid who gets 100% on every spelling test, but they can’t spell those same words two weeks later, is because once the spelling test is done, you don’t need to remember it. The thing that is important to recognize with dyslexia is the more often you read the same passage, the more myelinated your brain pathways become. As a kid emerges as a reader, we’re like, oh, this is awesome. Read this and read this, and read this.

We don’t often visit the same text more than once. The reason spelling is successful with dyslexics is because we visit the same texts five days a week. If you school four days a week, there’s modifications you can make to the program. That is what makes a tremendous difference. As a funny aside, my son was 14 at the time and when the program debuted, I said, “I have a spelling program I want to do with you.” He said, “I don’t know why you’re going to do that. I’m dyslexic, I can’t learn to spell.” I’m like, “Be that as it may, I want you for six weeks.” He said, “Ugh.” Every teenage boy has that special sound. At the end of six weeks, I said to him, “Bud, you’re off the hook, you don’t have to do this anymore.” He said, “No, I think I do.” I was surprised and he said, I can tell it’s making a difference. He’ll never win a spelling bee, but he can tell when he’s written a word that’s incorrect, it doesn’t look right to him. When it doesn’t look right, that’s the mark of an adept speller. That’s what makes all the difference in the world.

[00:15:07] Amber: That’s right. I think for me and my son, Levi, that was the thing that really helped us out the most is thinking about spelling in that way. Does that look right to you? In that process, how he would start to– I like that word, myelinated. I can’t spell it, but I like that word. Someone explained it to me once that that process is like pushing a wheelbarrow through the ground over and over, and over again until it creates this path. That’s what you’re doing with Spelling You See. day after day, days one through five, you’re reading the same passage, you’re spelling the same words, and you’re starting to notice if the word looks correct. It’s a really neat, fresh take on the spelling process, I think.

[00:15:53] Gretchen: I can tell you, the hardest thing in adopting this program will be not saying to your kids anymore, sound it out. What I love about this program is we teach spelling without using word lists and without doing any tests. There were times at my house where I can guarantee tears. All I had to say was, guys, it’s time for spelling, and I want to give you a test today. I love the fact that we can keep the learning pathways open in our head and make it an easier process. Kids come up to me all the time and say, I really like this, and that’s valuable to hear.

[00:16:38] Amber: I agree. I want to pivot us a little bit to the structure and the elements that make up Spelling You See. Some of these are new with the new edition, and some of them were included before, but maybe have changed a little bit. The first thing I want to talk about is the daily huddle. It’s a key component of Spelling You See. Can you explain what the Daily Huddle is and then the benefits to students and instructors that are using the daily huddle every day?

[00:17:05] Gretchen: One of the things we heard from parents, and we heard this long before we began rewriting this iteration, is that they felt like they were doing the same thing over and over again, and it was getting boring. We laughed because it was hard to ascertain whether the parents were bored or the students were bored. Sometimes it was one or the other, and sometimes it was everybody. We adopted this aspect of the daily huddle that the first day of the week, you’re going to read the passage to your child, and then you’re going to read the passage with your child.

The reason we ask you to do that, parents say to me all the time, oh, my child can read that, no sweat. It’s really important for them to hear cadence and pronunciation and the pause that an adept reader makes when they come to a period. We ask you to read it to them. We ask them to read it with you so that they can experience that cadence. Then the rest of the week, they can roll on their own. What we wanted to do was figure out, how do we get the most return on investment for a student’s time?

When you sit down with the daily huddle on day two, what you’re going to begin and ask your student is, were there some words that you found tricky, we call them knotty words, and that is K-N-O-T-T-Y. Were there words that you found tough? We’re going to ask them to choose a couple, two or three words. Some kids are really reluctant to do that, particularly if they’re a firstborn. You may have to say, I think this one needs a little bit of attention and this one and this one. You might have to pick out three, but they get the hang of it pretty quickly.

Parents told us in the focus groups that by the time they were four weeks in, the kids were very adept at going, these three words are going to give me a little bit of a challenge. We put a little bit more emphasis on those words. Then when they go through the second day and they chunk and copy work and then chunk their own copy work, it helps them go, oh, this is the tough one. I really need to look at pattern. That may change from day to day. The daily huddle allows us to collaborate for a brief period of time, just a couple of minutes, and then move forward. That guides the student through their day.

We also changed the see day in the program. That now presents the entirety of the passage for copy work. We don’t expect a student to copy the whole passage. What we expect the student to do is to say, I think the first two sentences are going to be easy. Starting with the third sentence, I might struggle a little bit. That’s where we recommend that they start their copy work and copy work. The joy of that is it’s limited to 10 minutes. It’s not a stress-inducing thing.

I know that there’s people who watch this video and they have a child who doesn’t want to pick this up, a pencil. The cool part about using Spelling You See is because it’s only 10 minutes, if you have a child who’s very reluctant to write, we advise you to start with 5 minutes, 2 minutes, wherever you can get them to come to the table and slowly work up to that 10 minutes. Makes a big difference.

[00:20:26] Amber: That 10-minute timer definitely was a relief for Levi. I’m going to set the timer. It’s just 10 minutes. Then you’re off the hook, buddy. It took the stress out of it. We know that when your kid is stressed, it makes it so much harder to teach them anything. As soon as you relieve that pressure, it’s so much easier for them to take in what they’re learning. Also I was thinking, as you were talking to about, the buzzword of multi-sensory learning, we’re hearing that all the time. The daily huddle really is a great exercise in the auditory part of it, the visual part of it. They’re picking up on these different sensory opportunities in that daily huddle. I think that’s pretty cool.

[00:21:12] Gretchen: The one thing I wanted to not forget to say is it is really a collaborative process. If you have a family who’s using Spelling You See, and you’re asking them, so what’s it like for me? Your journey is going to be a little bit different than it is for them. Your kids are different, maybe a different journey for each kid. I think that gives the opportunity for a child to take a little bit of control of their learning. In fact, Dr. Karen Holinga, who developed the program, wanted us to create a program that would keep those learning pathways open, would remove the stress of the experience. I really love her for that because it’s made a huge difference.

[00:21:53] Amber: Lesson-by-lesson instruction. What is that? It’s included in the new edition in levels C through G. Can you tell us what it is, why it was included? I know we added it in because of the customer feedback. Tell us more about that.

[00:22:10] Gretchen: When you used the Spelling You See materials in their first iteration, there was a lot of front-loaded information. Then we would say, in the first four lessons, we want you to do this. Then in the next four lessons, we want you to do this. The challenge with that is we all are a little bit distracted in this day and age. More information comes to us in a day than it came to our grandparents in their lifetimes. Sometimes parents wouldn’t remember what that was.

Being able to separate that out and make it a daily experience, eliminated the flip back and forth of finding stuff. It’s all in one page. It’s on two pages. It’s right there for you, right in front of you. That makes a huge difference for parents in the process because everything that you need from what is the chunking and then there’s ideas in here. The other thing we got from the focus groups is parents wanted some strategies. We created a whole bunch of knotty word video strategies so parents could use those with their kids and give them some additional ways to remember visually how something is spelled.

[00:23:29] Amber: Let’s go into that a little bit. The new videos are available on our website. You can find them on spellingyousee.com. They have lots of information and tips and tricks for how to use Spelling You See. Can you tell us about those new video elements and what they offer to the students?

[00:23:49] Gretchen: This was a very cool collaboration because we were trying to think, how do we help a student gain more control over the process? We really wanted the kids to drive the train here, so we gave them a variety of videos. Part of that daily huddle experience is for the parent to say, what knotty word strategy do you think might work best for you in this situation? That makes it really cool. We don’t have lesson-by-lesson videos, but the video instruction is really terrific.

[00:24:22] Amber: They’re great. I love them. Some other buzzwords that go along with Spelling You See. Instructional and confident dictation. Can you define–

[00:24:32] Gretchen: This was one that I had to wrestle with a little bit. I like the way we finally presented it, and I want to make sure that parents recognize that instructional dictation is the traditional way of helping a student word by word, providing all the punctuation and capitalization, correcting for error as it’s made, and time limiting your experience to 10 minutes. In fact, if the first sentence is tough, we even say in instructional dictation, we’d rather them do the first sentence twice than just plow through struggling to spell the words through the rest of the dictation.

This is a process. It’s like building spelling muscles, if you will. You get to that point, but every kid gets there at a different pace. Some kids are there the first week. Some kids aren’t there until 10 weeks. Remember I said it sometimes takes up to four and a half years to develop this proficiency. We want parents to stick with that instructional dictation until you have a student who’s flowing nicely through the whole of the dictation with few instances of correction.

Then you get to move on to the confident dictation because that’s what it is. The old program also suggested that if you’re in a level that has two dictations, to withdraw some of the supports in the second dictation. What we realized is for the kids who weren’t really getting it, that withdrawn support was a frustration point. We wanted to remove that. You’re going to stay with instructional dictation until it’s easy. Then you’ll move to confident dictation.

[00:26:17] Amber: What are some of the cues or instructions that you might say during instructional dictation? What are some of the tools or things you might use with your student to help move them along?

[00:26:29] Gretchen: The hardest part for this for parents is to take that 10 minutes and dictate a word at a time. If you have a Charlotte Mason background, you’re used to dictation, but you’re used to dictating a phrase at a time. The problem is when you dictate a phrase, the student might catch the first word and the last word and drop the ball on the words in between. The whole purpose of dictation is for them to be able to recall what they’ve practiced and put it down on paper. That’s why we wanted it to be word by word.

The other thing is we don’t want a kid to just roll around in misspellings. If they’ve misspelled a word, we gave some explicit instructions to pick up a piece of notebook paper and give them three options. One, of course, is the correct spelling. Then share those options with them and ask them which one looks right to you. What I did as a parent is I would choose the misspelling that they have already done as the first one. I’ve stopped them so they know that’s wrong. Then I would give them two more.

When you get a little further in, then you give them three spellings and you make sure that one of them is right. Don’t always put that in the middle either. Hopefully they will pick the right spelling. Then write that down. I want them to copy it down. I’ll say, great, you picked the right one. Here it is. Copy it down. Then we move on. The important thing is to remember the timer keeps rolling as you’re doing that. That’s a little bit of a change, giving them choices to be able to choose. Remember, then the power is still in their hands to make the right choice.

[00:28:20] Amber: I think you might have given me this tip, Gretchen. One thing that Levi and I would do is if he came to a word that was difficult, I would ask him to try it a couple of different ways. We had that conversation, which one looks right to you? Most of the time he could identify it. Even if he spelled it incorrectly two out of the three ways, he would get there. Then he would be able to say, this is the one I think looks correct. He would get it.

[00:28:47] Gretchen: That’s, of course, the ideal way to do it when you have a kid who can tolerate a little bit of frustration. If you have a child who has just had a negative experience with other spelling programs, we don’t want this to be an equivalent. What we said as a team is we didn’t want them to persevere in the wrong spellings. We wanted to encourage them. We want it to be a positive experience. Either way is correct.

[00:29:17] Amber: That was another mistake I made myself when I first started with the instructional dictation. I was reading a phrase at a time. Then I went back and read the instructions and corrected myself and started reading one word at a time. It was frustrating in the beginning for Levi to go at that pace. The 10-minute timer again took that pressure off. We’re going to go one word at a time. You’re going to spell it one word at a time. Once the timer goes off, we’re done. We move along.

[00:29:49] Gretchen: What we often find is that by the time kids are 8 or 10 lessons in, they have worked on that visual element. You give them the first word and they three words. You have to be there with them to see what they’re doing. That’s encouraging. You don’t have to make it difficult, but the important thing is giving them one word at a time allows them to focus on only that word.

[00:30:17] Amber: I think that’s an important point too. This is a program that’s for instructors that want to be involved. There are other programs for other subjects even where it’s more plug and play. Here’s your worksheet for the day or here’s what we’re going to do today. This one really requires you to be involved. I appreciated that. I really appreciated it. Not only for the reason that I could actually see the progress happening in real time, which was pretty cool to watch. I liked being able to walk alongside him and see how it was going. It definitely is for the instructor that wants to be part of that process.

[00:31:01] Gretchen: Parents will often say to me, they have three or four kids and they’re like, I don’t know if I can embrace this program because I don’t know if I can do all of this individually. The important thing is if you have three kids in the same level, you can do pretty much everything together, including the daily huddle. The only thing you’re going to have to reserve individual time for is that 10 minute dictation.

[00:31:24] Amber: The next one. I love this word, chunking. I don’t know about you, but when I was in school, spelling lists made me want to blow chunks. Yes, I hear that a lot from kids. This is not that kind of chunking. This is a whole different thing. What in the world is chunking and Spelling You See? How does it work? Can you explain specifically how it helps students develop their spelling skills?

[00:31:55] Gretchen: The goal here is to have students focus on small elements of language that aren’t focused on sound, but are predictable. They’re going to look the same way every time. My favorite example is E-W says, oo in the word do and oh in the word so. Sound it out. I’ve already corrupted the process. My example of so, if I say to you, Amber, spell the word “so” for me, this is why context matters. There’s three kinds of so, S-O, S-O-W, S-E-W, which one do I want? There are so many words like that in English.

We’ve predetermined vowel chunks, consonant chunks, bossy R chunks, silent E’s, endings. We ask the kids to focus on these things. The reason vowel chunks come first is because they’re the hardest ones to remember. I’ll give you an example. The word bird is I-R, E-R, or U-R. All three of those make the er sound. If I ask you to spell the word “bird”, only one of those is going to be correct. We want to visualize that process. We do that with simple colored pencils. When we ask a student to go through and find the elements, we’ve even made it easy for you as a parent to remind you, start with vowel chunks, because they’re the most difficult.

Then the second most difficult are consonant chunks. When a student goes through this passage, they are looking for the vowel chunks and they’re marking them with a colored pencil. They can use the colored pencils we provide. They can use highlighters. The act of coloring over it is a higher neurological process than just drawing a shape. I had a parent last weekend at a conference say to me, how’s my child going to do this? They are colorblind. We actually have a methodology for them to use symbols it’s color-coded answer keys. That makes it easier for them to be able to be successful with a program.

We don’t want to exclude kids just because they have a challenge. This student going through this passage would have gone through and chunked the vowel chunks. Then they would have gone back through and chunked the consonant chunks. Why do I send them through the passage twice? The reason we suggest to do that is because we know the brain can focus on one thing at a time. If they focus on vowel chunks first, then they focus on consonant chunks. It becomes easier for them in the process. That’s what chunking is. It’s not really a fancy process. It sounds like it’s a big deal, but it’s pretty easy.

[00:34:56] Amber: Let’s talk about colored pencils. Why colored pencils? Why is the eraser so important? You mentioned highlighters. are there other options that you can use besides a colored pencil? Because we all have the tubs. What can we use for that exercise?

[00:35:12] Gretchen: We offer colored pencils. What is unique and cool about our colored pencils is that they are erasable. That first day when your student finishes chunking, you’re going to look in the instructor’s handbook and it’s going to say how many chunks they should find. For instance, in this passage, this is passage number 16. When they’re looking for that, we want them to be able to find all of the chunks. We even break it out. There should be 9 vowel chunks, 11 consonant chunks, 7 seven bossy R chunks. This particular day, they didn’t get to those. They’ll get to those later in the week.

Instruction varies, but the important thing to remember is when you use the colored pencils that have erasers to them, that’s really important. What happens if I say to my student, there are, what did I say, seven vowel chunks, and they only have six? Sometimes I’ll just say, go back through and look. Sometimes they’ll say, you’re missing one in the third sentence.

The important thing is we want that first chunking experience to be right, because that’s what they’re going to use as their guide for the rest of the week. Now, I had a parent ask me two weeks ago, they said what their child is doing as a guide is as they chunk through in subsequent days, they’re flipping, they’re looking back. That’s not really what we want them to do. We want them to start committing those patterns to memory. We want them to go through and then evaluate their own work.

[00:36:57] Amber: It’s important to note too, the pre-written passage first, and then later they’re going to chunk their passage that they wrote in their own handwriting. They’re seeing it different ways.

[00:37:13] Gretchen: Two ways. The reason that we ask them to chunk their own handwriting is because we know neurologically, their brain treats their own handwriting differently than it treats what’s already in print. Let me also say that this is not a handwriting exercise on a veteran homeschool mod. I’m already looking at this going, can I get a twofer out of this? Handwriting and spelling? The simple answer is no, because if they’re focused on neat and tidy handwriting, they’re not going to be focused on the pattern in the words. We even say the handwriting can be sloppy copy. We just want to see the difference between an A and an O and a U and an O, so.

[00:37:54] Amber: Going back to the eraser part of the conversation, that was another key, I think when I was learning with Levi, to erase in the moment. Don’t wait till you get to the end of the sentence. Don’t wait till you get to the end of the passage and then go back and fix your mistakes. Part of that standing by and working with them is, oh, we didn’t chunk that one quite right. Can you erase that? Also, how important it is to clearly chunk. we want to make sure we are coloring in what we want so that there’s no confusion or bleeding over into other parts of the word.

[00:38:33] Gretchen: We have some kids who are like, “I don’t want to use colored pencils. I want to use highlighters.” That’s fine. It means that they’ll have to be a little bit more deliberative. One of the advantages that seems tiny, but is really important, is that act of really doing this process with that chunk makes that chunk more visual to them. That’s helpful. the process of actually scratching over that chunk makes it more visual.

[00:39:03] Amber: I was mind blown the other day when I found out there are friction erasable highlighters. I didn’t know that was a thing, but they exist.

[00:39:13] Gretchen: I didn’t know that until a conference I was at early this year. One of the kids who was having success with Spelling You See was excited to come and show me what they’d found. Look, Ms. Gretchen, look what I found. That was pretty cool.

[00:39:27] Amber: That was cool. Something to add to my Amazon cart for later.

[00:39:31] Gretchen: [laughs] Yes.

[00:39:34] Amber: Let’s talk about the new illustrations and passages in the updated version. We went through and updated the illustrations, obviously, and made some changes to some of the passages. What were those changes? Why did we make them? What can people expect in the new editions?

[00:39:50] Gretchen: Parents gave us some feedback on some illustrations that they thought needed improvement. We took that feedback and incorporated that into the new elements. Then there were some passages that we felt needed a little retooling, and that was also based on parental feedback. That is where we got to that.

[00:40:11] Amber: I did really enjoy, especially the passages in Americana because I’m a American history nerd. We learned so much too from those passages. we’re learning spelling, but I was like, all these fun facts, these are great.

[00:40:25] Gretchen: I’m so glad that you said that because sometimes parents will look at the subject matter that’s presented in each of the levels and they will say, “Oh, well, we’re working in the trivium on ancient history. I want to use the ancient history one.” In our system, the ancient history one, if you start there, you’re not going to have success because the words are too long, they’re too complex. We recommend that when you’re placing a student who’s a fully emerged reader, you use the placement assessment and we never place a student higher than level E, which is American spirit, because we want them to have enough time to develop that visual muscle memory. Yes.

[00:41:11] Amber: That’s a good point. I want to ask you a little bit more about your personal experience. What would you say is the most rewarding aspect of seeing students progress through the program?

[00:41:24] Gretchen: From a personal perspective, I love it when I have talked to a family at a homeschool conference and they have purchased Spelling You See, and then they come back the next year and say, wow, that was a really different experience. So much more fun for us than what we had done in the past. My most personal experience is that kid who said, I think I have to do this longer.

He got to college and said to me one day, I think I’m going to take British literature next semester. I minored in literature and I said to him, dude, I wouldn’t take Brit Lit as an elective if you paid me. Are you crazy? He said, well, I think I can. He had a teacher who corrected for spelling. He had to write seven papers in that semester and he got a good solid B out of it. I was so proud of him. I think that is really the element that makes Spelling You See different. It changes your students’ belief in themselves. That is priceless.

[00:42:36] Amber: I was going to share the confidence, I think, was key with Levi in my experience. One thing I think about a lot is that a few years ago, whenever we would sign a birthday card, he would draw a little picture and he wouldn’t write a message. I would ask him, why don’t you write happy birthday? Why don’t you write a little note to granny or whoever we’re signing the card for? As we started working on his spelling with the program, he gained enough confidence to start signing birthday cards. Isn’t that awesome? It’s such a little thing, but just seeing how he could go from, I don’t think I can do this, to, yes, I can write a few sentences for my grandma’s birthday card. That was really neat.

[00:43:23] Gretchen: It’s not a little thing. To be able to give your child the confidence to say “Yes, I can,” is huge.

[00:43:31] Amber: You’re right. Have you encountered any particularly memorable success stories from families who use Spelling You See.

[00:43:39] Gretchen: Oh, I’m so glad you asked me that question. Yes. Actually, I have. One family who has seven children. They had used four different kinds of spelling programs. They’d use spelling programs that started with letter tiles, and then you would build the word. You know what? Most spelling programs, no matter how creative you are, if you’re presenting a list of words, your brain’s going to treat it as item memory. Do you write a grocery list? If you write it and forget it, do you get what’s on it? More importantly, do you remember what you did two weeks ago? No. It’s the same thing.

This family was so excited because they really thought that they had some struggling learners. They just didn’t have the right tools. That made a huge difference. Probably the most impressive story for me personally was a mom in California, a grandmom in California, who had been told all the way through school that she was basically functionally illiterate. What she found as an adult in her 50s is that she had acute vision issues. Once those vision issues could be resolved, then she learned to read.

Then she realized that reading and spelling weren’t the same thing. She found her way to Spelling You See. She learned right alongside her grandkids. She taught her grandkids, but she had a book for herself. She learned to spell. She was more excited than the kids were, which was really wild. At least six or seven times a year, I’ll find a parent who says, boy, I want to use this because I can’t spell. If I say to them, “You can,” do you know how powerful that is to model to your kids that you can learn right alongside them? It’s really cool.

[00:45:31] Amber: That’s really cool. I hadn’t heard that story before. That’s really neat. For our audience who might be considering Spelling You See, what would you say are the main benefits of the program?

[00:45:41] Gretchen: We’ve already talked about confidence, but because we’re going to use this same passage five days in a row, the benefits of myelinization can’t be understated. Basically what myelinization is how you– I love your description, you’re carving a path and you’re making it smoother. That helps kids emerge as readers. I often talk to parents who’ve used the program for a year and said, wow, not only did my child develop some spelling proficiency or more spelling proficiency or not burst into tears every time I asked them to spell, but their reading has improved as well.

That’s really important. I think knowing that you have a finite amount of time, knowing that I’m not going to ask you to spend 30 minutes in copywork, knowing that we’re going to say, spend 10 minutes in copywork, we’re going to say spend 10 minutes in dictation, that helps too, because that works in conjunction with the neurology of how kids learn. We’re not stressing them out. That’s pretty cool.

[00:46:55] Amber: I have a smartphone that when I spell something incorrect, corrects it for me. I have the Grammarly app installed on my computer. When I misspell something, it underlines it in red and lets me know. What do you say to people who say, my kids don’t need to learn how to spell because they are growing up in a world where they’re not going to need it?

[00:47:23] Gretchen: It scares me a little bit because parents will say, my kids don’t need to learn to spell. Spell check will do that for them. I’m going to share a visual because I think this is important. The problem is we have so many homonyms, homographs, homophones in English. Spell check doesn’t always get it right. I’ll share this screen with you and I think it’ll answer itself. I’ll read it only because I think it’s important for our recording.

“My teacher told me not to worry about spelling because there will be auto-correct in the future. For that, I am eternally grapefruit.” It’s the truth. I get tickled at voice dictation on my phone because I’ll say one thing and what Siri thinks is wildly different. Then I’ll be typing a text and, fat fingers, I’ll mistype the word said and it has no idea how to correct that. One of the things I think that’s really important is for us to recognize spell check may be able to help you get it right, but if you have no idea where to begin, it’s not going to save you.

[00:48:42] Amber: It makes me think too about how– and it goes along with the confidence side of it, I think too. How many times do you start writing a sentence and then say, I don’t really know how to spell that word, so I’m going to do something else? It opens up so many more opportunities when you are a fluent speller and makes the process of ideating and writing so much easier. Just laying that foundation, I think is a gift that we can give to our kids.

[00:49:11] Gretchen: I say this all the time when I talk about creative writing. I’m a little kid. I want to write a story about an elephant. An elephant. I’ll write about a pig. I can spell pig. I don’t think I can spell elephant. Automatically they’re pulling their own world in and making it smaller. I think this expands their world and that is super cool.

[00:49:32] Amber: Agreed. For someone that wants to get started and they go to our store and start looking at Spelling You See, or they see us at a conference and pull the books off the shelf and start looking through them, how do they know which level to pick?

[00:49:47] Gretchen: That’s what I love about this new placement tool that we have. It’s interactive. It’s going to ask you as the parent how your child spells. It’s going to give you two choices. You get to choose, oh, they spell more like this, or they spell more like this. Then it’s a flowchart. It’s going to take you through to where you need to be. We have test driven it hundreds of times, and we’re delighted that it’s so accurate. It really does a good job.

[00:50:24] Amber: What if you complete the placement tool, and you get to the end of it, and you say, I don’t think that’s right, or maybe you’re just a little uncertain, or maybe you have a special case, a student that has difficulties or something out of the norm? What can parents do to make sure that they’re in the right level?

[00:50:44] Gretchen: I love that you asked that question, because we always say, if you still have a question, reach out. We have live chat. You can send an email. I’m old fashioned. I want to pick up the phone, and I want to call. Call us, talk to one of our placement specialists, talk to one of our customer service reps. They’ve all used the program in some form or fashion. They’re familiar with it. They have helped families out before. Your story is not going to be unique to them, and they really want to help you get it right the first time. That makes a whole heck of a lot of difference.

[00:51:18] Amber: Is there anything, Gretchen, that I didn’t ask you about that you’d like to share before we close our session?

[00:51:24] Gretchen: There’s a couple of things that I would like us to be able to talk about, and this has to do more with parents who have the challenge and say, I don’t know what’s going on with my student, but I’m really struggling. I’m going to turn my head here and look at one of the questions that was asked of us yesterday, and it is, what are the milestones? When do I begin a spelling program? I’m going to make this twofold, because sometimes parents will say, oh, I have a 10-year-old, do I begin at A? The answer is no.

That’s why the placement tool is important. A beginning speller might be four, might be five, might be six. You’re looking for a child who has some form of a grip on a pencil, maybe writing their own name, and has a desire to find words. What does that sign say? They’re asking you if the sign says stop. If you see that in a child, then they’re ready to begin the journey. If you have an older child, you don’t begin at A, you begin at where the placement tool drops you, unless you think, maybe that’s not right. Then, of course, you call us to make sure that it’s right.

[00:52:43] Amber: Why would that be important? Why wouldn’t I want to put my 10-year-old in level A?

[00:52:49] Gretchen: To say to a 10-year-old, I’m going to spell the word “cat”, and I want you to write it “ku-ah-ti”, you lost them. They’re gone. We want to place them at the end of their experience, but we don’t want to overwhelm them and place them above where they should be placed. That makes a huge difference. Parents did ask me, how come you updated level C again? Because we did this update two years ago.

The reason we updated it again is because we think this element of the daily huddle and the visual process, I’ll show this in here for you, the visual process of being able to recognize that everything you do comes back around to the first thing that you do is really important. We wanted to make sure that our parents in level C got the advantage of that as well. It makes a difference.

[00:53:45] Amber: Any other questions we didn’t cover, Gretchen?

[00:53:48] Gretchen: How to help my good reader get better at spelling. Remember, reading is decoding and spelling is encoding. No matter how much you read, unless you’re that holy visual learner, it’s not going to improve your spellings. Some kids are, they just don’t need a spelling program. I had two of those, and they’d see a word one time and they could remember how to spell it. They’d see it in their reading. Myelinization, my eight-year-old saw that once and he was like, I know what that word means. He could write it. That’s the odd kid out. That’s not the majority.

In fact, the research that we followed through the process says that really only 17% of us are visual enough that we don’t need a spelling program. The hard part is if you’re that parent, I’m that parent, so when you have a kid who struggles to learn to spell, you’re going, what’s the problem? It was easy for me. That’s why we need to use the tools that are to our advantage to help our kids learn to spell. We shouldn’t make assumptions.

I think that takes us through all the questions. I just want to say, Amber, one of the things I love about this program more than anything else is that we know it works. You may say, I don’t know if I want to invest that money. Invest the time, invest the money, and if it doesn’t work out for you, reach out to our customer service. We want to make it right. We’ll help you either get the right placement or we’ll help you return your materials. Either one of those. I think we do have a question. Just popped up.

[00:55:36] Amber: One just got right in under the wire.

[00:55:38] Gretchen: [laughs] It’s a good question. I’m really glad it was asked. She said–

[00:55:42] Amber: I’ll read it out for you. She said, “Can you go through the program faster than one lesson a day for an older student?’

[00:55:50] Gretchen: You can. However, remember, we want to work in cooperation with the neurology of learning. What we would want you to do is do the program as it’s designed. Do the two pages as they’re designed. Then if you want to do the next two pages four or five hours later, do that. Don’t do it all at once because that is too much to ask. I’m really glad that question was asked because what we have found when parents would do four pages at a time, it doesn’t give a better return. Limiting that time is really important.

[00:56:31] Amber: When you say not all at one time, you mean not all in one sitting.

[00:56:35] Gretchen: Correct.

[00:56:35] Amber: Sit down, do it. Like you said, walk away for a while, do something else for a while, and then maybe come back. I think it’s also important to note the power of sleep and how important a night’s rest is for learning and committing things to your brain. Sometimes it is okay.

[00:56:51] Gretchen: There’s actually three kinds of memory that we have, and we don’t have time to go into that. There’s short-term, there’s active working memory, and then there’s long-term memory. When you are working with words, you’re in that short-term phase. We want you to get it to the long-term phase. The way it gets there best is through sleep. I’m really glad that you said that.

[00:57:17] Amber: Definitely flexible. If you’re able to give your student the time to rest on it and commit it to memory, then that’s always the best.

[00:57:26] Gretchen: When this program first came out, I thought it was fantastic. I have to say, in all honesty, this new iteration improves on something that I would have told you 11 years ago couldn’t be improved upon. That’s really exciting.

[00:57:41] Amber: I’m very impressed with it, obviously, personally, and very proud to be part of Demme Learning and what we’ve been doing. We’re just at time. Thank you, Gretchen, so much for sharing your knowledge and your wisdom with us. Thank you to everyone who joined today and is joining on the podcast later. Appreciate your time and hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day.

[00:58:03] Gretchen: Great. Thank you all so much for being here with us today. We don’t take it lightly that you allow us to come into your living rooms. See, I told you Amber would be terrific. Thanks so much, everybody. Have a great afternoon.

[00:58:16] Amber: Bye.

[music]

[00:58:19] Amber: Thanks, again, for joining us. We’re glad to be a part of your educational community. You can help us grow our community even more by rating, reviewing, and subscribing to the show wherever you may be hearing this. Don’t forget that you can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show, or on our YouTube channel. We’ll see you again next time. Until then, keep building strong foundations for lifelong learning.