I looked at level one in the All About Spelling program and I will be exploring it further in the near future. It is a multisensory program (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic) that takes the struggle out of spelling for students. Some interesting things that I have found in the teacher’s guide so far are that certain sets of phonograms shouldn’t be taught together, such as b, d or a, e, i, o, u or p, b or m, n because they sound alike to an untrained ear. I also read about how some letter make more than one sound, such as ‘a.’ An ‘a’ can sound like apple, acorn, or water, which is something I know but I never thought about how to teach that to students. This program doesn’t state a particular order in which to teach phonograms but rather focusing on figuring out which phonograms need to be taught and teaching those phonograms. Since I was a little confused with all the new vocabulary I have been reading, I had to look up what a phonogram actually was and I found that a phonogram is a character or symbol used to represent a word, syllable, or phoneme.
