It is that time of the year again when lots of home educators are looking at which workbooks to use for the new upcoming academic year so I wanted to share some thoughts and photos on the Bond Spelling books (UK based) that we are using with my daughter (aged 9).
And yes I know as home educators we do not need to worry about SATS and I know the books have SATs written broadly on the front cover but for me that just means they tie into the UK curriculum. My daughter wanted to work on her spelling and she wanted to able to do so independently, she wanted somewhere where she got get spelling lists that she could learn and build on. She also likes workbooks that are not too cluttered or too distracting in terms of bright colours everywhere. So for her these look like a good option.
So what is inside these books ?
Each book is broken down into 10 units. Each unit is split over 4 pages. And as you progress through the units the spellings do get harder. Each page includes 2 or 3 activities (like word search, completing sentences, looking for patterns in words) and on each page there is a spelling list (normally 16 words). So that means one unit would include 64 spellings – wow that initially surprised me. But when we started looking at the books my daughter noticed that there were quite a few words that she already knew how to spell in the list and words that were very similar. Plus as she was working through the books herself she could either do one unit very quickly or take her time on the units that she struggled with. (Plus all the workbooks do include the answers in the middle of the book)
The 8-9 book starts off with spellings like – bed, bat, egg, oak but then builds up to harder words. Examples of some of the activities in the 8-9 book are below
and by the time they get to unit 10 the spellings are a bit harder (although I do think they build the spellings up nice and gradually I didn’t think there was a massive jump between any of the units).
The 9-10 book (this is the one she is working through at the moment).
There are some words that are new to her but there are also a lot that are just revision for her. And for me one of the big things about this book is she is learning new words but because the new spellings are mixed in with words she can already spell she is not getting discouraged. In fact I would say it is boosting her confidence.
The 10-11 workbook – we have not done anything out of this one yet but it looks like it is the same format with a mix of words I know my daughter can already spell and new words. And the same sort of activities as the other two workbooks – word searches, complete the sentence, scrambled up words etc.
The 10 -11+ stretch workbook does contain harder words that the 10 -11 book.
They do have a whole range of different English and Maths workbooks in the BOND series but for now the Spelling and vocabulary books are the only ones we have looked at, if you want to see example of their other workbooks have a look here – Oxford University Press
I hope that the photos help some of you when you are choosing your new workbooks.
ofamily learning together 