Phonics, Webster's Speller, answer to L/R brain question

I’ve been busy teaching a group of 9 remedial 3rd to 6th grade students to read with the help of volunteers from my church. It went well! Their reading improved, on average, 1.4 grade levels after 2 months of instruction twice a week, about 90 minutes per time. (Sometimes less based on how much recess they got that day and other factors such as student to teacher ratio that day. The school does not have a gym, we got much less instructional time in on rainy days where they did not get recess. You could really tell when they didn't get enough recess, especially with the boys.)

We taught them with a shortened version of my online lessons, Don Potter’s Blend Phonics Reader, and Webster’s Speller. They played games at the end, my phonics concentration game and also a relay race type game with magnetic letters where they competed to see who could make the most words. They only thing they really learned in the last game was the importance of vowels, but it allowed us to clean up and they all loved it and looked forward to making words. The students also got a copy of my phonics lessons on DVD to watch for review, expect for 2 students who did not have a DVD player, those students watched the movies online at their local library on a computer with headphones.

Webster’s Speller is very powerful, it was helpful for all the students, but especially helpful for two ESL students (and their English is actually very good.) The arrangement of words by accent pattern is amazingly helpful for an ESL student, it helps them figure out when to schwa vowels, a process that comes more naturally for most students whose native language is English. (However, it is still very helpful for regular students, just more helpful for ESL students than for normal students.)

We also did a lot of oral spelling, that was very helpful as well, and very efficient for a large group of students.

I’ve been trying to get more people to try the Speller, and now have several people who post on the Well trained mind forum (a forum for those who homeschool with the Classical method) to try it out—I figured that people willing to tackle Latin would be most likely to tackle Webster’s Speller. A few are now trying it out, and one mom who’s trying it out wrote, “One thing that draws me to Webster's Blue Back speller is that he *wrote* the dictionary. I feel that he is truly an expert on the English Language.” He is, and you really have to try Webster’s Speller and see it in action to appreciate how powerful it is and how much better it is than any other phonics method out there.

You can see how to use Webster’s Speller here,
and I recently created a 20 minute movie showing how to use the Speller.

After typing replies on 9 pages of how to use the Speller on the Well Trained Mind Forum, I decided I had to make the movie or I’d by typing forever explaining how to use it. A picture IS worth 1,000 words in some cases.

Speaking of pictures, I haven’t been able to comment until today due to computer issues with certain websites that I just now resolved. Someone asked about the left/right brain thing with language, here’s the post and the movie where I discuss that. (My computer issues were such that it would load up at first, but then would not let me scroll down or do anything, so I could see a bit of the top post, and the recent comments when blogger had them working.)