The Basic Speller is a spelling program for beginning students and consists of eight volumes of 48 lessons each. It presents lessons and practice for learning the relationships between sounds and their spellings.

The Basic Speller is a spelling program for beginning students and consists of eight volumes of 48 lessons each. It presents lessons and practice for learning the relationships between sounds and their spellings.

Students cut apart provided words. Teacher guides students to group similar words together. If necessary, teacher prompts with "Notice how the words look" and/or "Notice how the words sound."

The purpose of the sort is NOT to teach "rules" regarding what sounds these letter combinations make. Instead, it is to build confidence in recognizing some common, yet difficult combinations when reading words and also spelling words with this sound in it.

For an extension, students could also create subgroups by sorting according to where the letter combination is found in the word-at the beginning, middle, or end.

It is suggested that an anchor word for each combination be added to a resource such as a word wall or word study notebook for future reference.

For assessment, students could sort and glue into the groups, read the list of words from the sort, or spell the words from the sort.

Students will be the definition of vocabulary experts as they use the skills they learn in this lesson to track, define, and ultimately master unfamiliar words.