Interleaving Practice and JCSpell

"Practice problems are interleaved if the problems are arranged so that consecutive problems cannot be solved by the same strategy."

You can better understand interleaving by knowing what it is not: it is not blocked practice. Blocked practice is focused on a narrow segment of knowledge or a singular skill. Block practice typically yields better performance during the training period which is often incorrectly interrupted as mastery. However, it yields poorer retention on a future tests or during future use.

In JCSpell, we front-load phonograms and rules. Then, we are able use the interleaving approach as we analyze words (Think to Spell ). Since we are using interleaving in our word study, we do not group words by a rule or spelling pattern (blocked practice). Instead we work with words based on their frequency in print (reading and writing) and spelling difficulty level. We begin with the most common words that are easiest to spell and move to the ones that are more difficult to spell.

When words are occasionally grouped in Alice NIne's Word Analyses Series (grades 4 and 5), they will be grouped by a common root in order to practice word construction principles or by sound (homophones).