The Skill Sharpeners: Spell & Write series of workbooks is available for kindergarten through sixth grade. The kindergarten book differs from the others as it spends more time on phonics and doesn’t introduce spelling lists each week. I’m focusing on the books for grades one through six that share a similar approach for teaching spelling and writing skills, including capitalization and punctuation.
These full-color books feature plenty of cute illustrations. This is one of the few Evan-Moor series that is not reproducible, and the books are not available as PDFs. But they are inexpensive enough that buying individual student books shouldn't be a problem.
Lessons are presented in 12 themed units, each unit beginning with a story or scenario to introduce the theme. Each unit has about nine pages, and I expect that most students will complete a page a day, so it will take about two weeks to complete a unit. Spelling lists are tied to unit themes rather than phonics or spelling rules.
Units always include a spelling list and at least one writing activity, and they conclude with a spelling test, a set of multiple-choice questions, and a sentence to be rewritten correctly. But the other activities vary greatly, even from unit to unit within one book. Students might write spelling words to finish sentences, capitalize words correctly in sentences, write a paragraph in response to a prompt, learn vocabulary via a crossword puzzle, punctuate sentences correctly, write spelling words on the outline of a drawing (called a Spellamadoodle activity), or practice skills in some other fashion.
Summary
With the Skill Sharpeners: Spell & Write series, students work with fewer spelling words over the course of a year than in a traditional spelling program (e.g., Evan-Moor’s Building Spelling Skills series), but they have more activities that help them learn those words. And they are likely to find the colorful format attractive.
