Why don 4-Blocks teachers send home traditional lists of spelling words?
Because having students memorize long lists of spelling words wasn’t getting us where we wanted to go! Personally, my students always memorized the lists of words, aced the test on Friday, and then returned to school on Monday to misspell the same words again! What was happening was that students were memorizing the words and storing them in their short-term memories. After the test, the words were tossed from short-term memory banks. In Four Blocks, we’ve decided that it’s far more important to teach students HOW to spell than to teach them WHAT to spell. We’d rather teach them a word chunk and how to make their knowledge of the spelling pattern of that chunk or the meaning of that chunk work for them. If you can spell best and you recognize that it has the est rime pattern, then you don’t have to memorize vest, crest, test, rest, zest, etc. when you need one of those words.
