Melissa Forney's Picture Speller for Young Writers

I'm a special education resource teacher who purchased this book for my resource students to facilitate ease of process writing for them and with the hope that the pictures will help stimulate engagement and ideas. Got it in the mail last night. It looks terrific -- the pictures are smartly sorted into possible writing topic categories and are colorful, easy on the eye, and kid-friendly. Picture spelling -- what a great idea for reading disabled students whose minds are chock full of knowledge and ideas but who are impeded by their disability from expressing their ideas in writing.So I'm excited to use this book in my classroom. My only concern is that some of the categories in this book betray an unconscious cultural/lifestyle bias. I work in an urban elementary school. My students aren't going to be writing passages about fairs and pie-eating contests. There is only one category pertaining to urban life, while there are several that pertain to rural life (farm, ranch, fair). And more fantasy categories would be nice too -- there are lots of non-fiction categories, fewer categories conducive to creative writing.Therefore, a suggestion to the publisher/author for future editions of what has the potential to be a valuable writing resource would be to expand the categories and increase the number of pictures.

Helpful in teaching struggling readers.

This book is such a wonderful gift for kids who are Right Brained learners! My son needs a visual when learning to spell/read and this book has been great. We use it for practice reading and spelling challenges. I love all the categories created and we hope there will be another book out someday soon for more :) The book has great colorful illustrations and my son loves it.

My daughter was thrilled with this for her birthday. She wants to communicate more through writing than she has the skills for. The picture dictionary let her sit down and write a story that night to share with Dad. He was surprised that she did it all that night, he thought she'd been working on it for a few days. Some of the pictures don't apply to our life. It would be fun if they came out with some other versions.

I just bought this book for my 7 year old daughter who is a struggling reader. This is an amazing book and is helping my daughter be an independent learner. She has not put this book down since it arrived. I would highly recommend this book to anyone, especially if you have a struggling learner.

Just what I was looking for! We use this for spelling works, one page per week. We write the words, sentences, and drill them. Works great for my special needs kids.

My six and eight year old girls love this book. They use it to write stories and describe pictures they draw. They like to be able to look up and spell words without asking Mom. We homeschool so encouraging independent and creative learning is important to me and this book does a fine job.

We liked this book to help our young son with spelling