Super Spellers: Seven Steps to Transforming Your Spelling Instruction

by Mark Weakland

Many teachers are frustrated with how spelling is traditionally taught and finding the time to support young spellers with explicit strategy instruction. Author Mark Weakland developed Super Seven Steps to Transforming Your Spelling Instruction, an approach to teaching spelling in a way that is research-based and tied to authentic reading and writing. Super Spellers helps teachers understand what their students need through frequent formative assessments. The book focuses on the scope of spelling instruction and teaching spelling strategies to increase students' word-solving skills. Once kids are comfortable and competent spellers they become super readers and writers, too. In addition to step-by-step guidance, each chapter features an If you only have 10 minutes lesson plan segment. The appendix contains word inventories, a sample scope and sequence, examples of spelling list transformation, and word ladder activities.

208 pages, Paperback

Published September 19, 2017

About the author

While earning a degree in the sciences, author/educator/musician Mark Weakland played drums and percussion with scores of Pittsburgh-based bands. He then went on to earn multiple teacher certifications and a master’s degree in education.

Mark expresses his creative side through music and writing. He is the author of eighteen non-fiction children’s books. Upcoming books, written as collaborations between Warner Brothers, Sports Illustrated Kids, and Capstone Press, include a set of Scooby-Doo (and mathematics) books, a set of Wile E. Coyote (and physics) books, and a set of hockey (shapes and patterns) books.

Other kid projects include an award-winning audio book, a poetry collection, and Jack Attack, his first YA novel. Mark’s books have received outstanding reviews from Booklist and Library Media Connection and won multiple awards, such as the 2012 Green Award for Sustainable Children’s Literature and the 2011 Eureka Nonfiction Children’s Book Award.

His academic book for teachers and administrators, Super Core! Supercharging Your Basal Reading Program with More Reading, Writing, and Word Work, will be published by the International Reading Association in January of 2014.

As a musician and songwriter, Mark has written and recorded music for both kids and grown-ups. His songs have won Parents' Choice and Children's Web awards and finished as finalists in The John Lennon Songwriting and USA Songwriting contests. Performing on drums, guitar, and vocals, Mark still records and plays with various artists and bands in Western Pennsylvania.