Spelling Goals Lesson 7, The Disaster of the Disappearing Letters (silent letters)

The Spelling goals program is a multimedia series of 12 lessons designed to help students with fourth through sixth grade achievement levels gain mastery over hard-to grasp spelling concepts.

Each lesson in the program consists of audio media and three black-line activity sheets. The audio provides practice in correctly writing words containing phonetic irregularities, troublesome suffixes, exceptions to spelling rules or are unusual words that need special attention. The audio combine expert spelling instruction with entertaining stories which are specifically designed to gain and hold students' interest. While the primary emphasis of the program is on spelling, the pro- gram also promotes vocabulary growth by continually demonstrating the correct usage of the words taught.

Each audio directed lesson features a character or set of characters who try to foil the sinister Spelling Ghoul's attempt to confuse the spelling abilities of students everywhere. Special effects, music, and dialogue are often used to heighten students' interest in the material to be learned.

Every effort has been made to make all elements of the program enjoyable and meaningful. All lessons are self-directing and self-correcting. This allows students to work through the lessons at an independent rate and to evaluate their performances privately.

The audio narrator provides complete instructions for doing the many exercises on the student activity sheets. Games, puzzles, secret messages, codes, and lively illustrations are used in the activity sheets to create interest in the lessons. The exercises in each lesson are grouped around a specific spelling concept so that students may concentrate for blocks of time on a particular set of spelling words.

USING THE PROGRAM

The Audio Media

Each audio medium begins with an entertaining introduction designed to capture the students' interest. As each story unfolds, a friendly narrator, with the help of the characters in the story, explains the spelling activities to be done and directs the students' work. Music special audio effects and dialogue add to the enjoyment of the lesson.

Timed pauses are included in the audio to allow students to complete brief responses on the activity sheets. However, when more than a few seconds are needed to complete a response or to read over specific material, an electronic tone signals the students to stop the player. Students should be reminded that they may also stop the player whenever additional response time is needed, or to change the audio or replay any material they may wish to hear. The use of headsets is recommended to avoid distracting other students in the classroom and to reinforce the interaction between student and narrator.

The running time of the audio averages approximately 25 minutes. The average working time of each lesson is about 35 minutes. It should be remembered that this time is only an approximation. Since the student stops and starts the player several times during the course of each lesson to read material or to complete exercises, the actual time needed will depend on the student's working speed.

NOTE: Because of the nature of the content, lessons may differ in length.

The Activity Sheets

Three activity sheets duplicated from black-lines are used in each lesson of the program. Activity sheets include carefully arranged spelling exercises and contain lively illustrations depicting characters and events from the story presented on the audio. In each lesson, the first two activity pages are completed by the students as the audio presentation progresses. The responses on these pages are checked and corrected by the students through answers given by the narrator. The last activity page contains two review exercises, on of which is a spelling quiz of 14 words the students have encountered in the lesson. These words are dictated by the narrator and corrected by the students with the help of the narrator. The final review activity is completed after the audio has finished playing and serves to reinforce what they have learned in the lesson.

The Teacher's Guide

This guide contains individual summaries of the 12 lessons in the program. Each summary lists the objectives of the lessons, a synopsis of the story around which the lesson is centered, a description of each written activity, and reproductions of all student activities with correct answers overprinted.

Included in the Teacher’s Guide are several creative follow-up activities to help reinforce the concepts taught in the program.