How to Start Word Study at the Beginning of the Year: A Three-Phase Launch Plan

Back to School, Schedules, Word Study & Spelling, Word Study Routines

August 7, 2026

THE SHORT VERSION

You don’t need to have word study groups figured out the first day of school! Before students walk in, decide which activities your word study cycle will include. During week one, give our spelling inventory. Then spend your word study block training ONE activity at a time with a whole-group word list. After your spelling inventory is scored, sort your students into leveled groups, and get ready to begin your staggered rotation where students cycle through their activities. Spelling homework routines and game centers can be added in gradually after that, once your routine is running smoothly.

If you have ever tried to launch a five-group, staggered, differentiated word study rotation during the first few weeks of school, you already know how that goes. (Spoiler alert: it ends with you trying to start a small group again and again while student after student asks what they are supposed to be doing and looks like they are drowning because they can’t find their supplies.)

I have written A LOT about my word study routine on this blog. I’ve shared my 7, 8, or 9 day word study cycle, my staggered schedule and the two tips that make it work, and how I organize my games and center area. What I have never written about is the part that comes BEFORE all of that: the messy, un-Instagrammable first stretch of days where you have no data, no groups, and a class full of students who do not yet know where the pencils are stored.

So let’s fix that today. Below is the three-phase plan I use to go from Day 1 of your launch to a word study block that runs like a well-oiled machine.

👉 And listen, if you are reading this in October, or January, or the week after spring break, this plan still works. Launch it after a track out. Launch it in the middle of a quarter. Launch it the week you finally decide your current spelling routine isn’t cutting it. The phases work whenever you decide to start them.

Who this is for: A 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade teacher who wants a differentiated word study block based on data.

Traditional calendar or year-round, first days of school or the middle of a grading period, the plan runs the same way.

What you’ll need:

The Engaged Spelling Inventory, which is aligned with the Words Their Way Spelling Inventory but better than ever, and I’ll send it to you for free at that link.
Pattern-based word lists for the range of spellers in your room. (Don’t have them? I’ve got you covered with the word lists for all levels.)
Composition notebooks, binders, or stapled booklets for student work
A designated shelf, cabinet, or corner where word study materials will live
15 to 20 minutes a day in your schedule

Time required: About three to four weeks, 15 to 20 minutes a day, depending on how many activities you choose.

BEFORE DAY 1: DECIDE YOUR ACTIVITIES AND HOW LONG YOUR CYCLE WILL RUN

Before you can set up a shelf or run a single copy, you have to know what’s going into your rotation. Each activity you choose will add 1-2 days to your students’ word study cycle.

Check out the activities I choose from below, then listen in for why I recommend you ditch the Monday through Friday routines in exchange for a longer, more flexible cycle.

Here’s the buffet of word study activities I choose from:

Discovery Word Search or Unlock the List to launch the new word list
Meet with the Teacher for a differentiated small group lesson
Partner games or hands-on independent activities
Word study notebook activities
Word sorting
Catch Up Day / “You Choose” sorts
Self-quizzing with Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check
Technology, if there’s a spelling site or app your students will use
Writer’s Notebook Day, a whole-group day where students hunt through their own writing for misspelled words. This one is CRITICAL to me because it’s where students see that word study is actually about their real spelling.
“Hear it/Sort and Spell It” assessment at the end of the cycle

Ditch Monday through Friday. Most of us were trained to plan word study as “on Monday we do this, on Tuesday we do this.” Then reality hits. We have a two-day week for Thanksgiving, an assembly on Wednesday, a fire drill during our block, and a snow day. Monday-Friday routines set us up to fail, and worse, we lose student buy-in when we’ve trained them for a schedule that rarely happens the way we said it would.

Instead, think of your word study tasks as a cycle of activities that students move through regardless of what day of the week it happens to be. My cycle runs 7, 8, or 9 days, which means one word list takes about two weeks.

Before you start checking boxes, hear me on this one: you are choosing your STARTING lineup, not your forever lineup. You do not have to pick every activity on that list, and you definitely don’t have to pick them all right now. Choose the ones that will be most impactful for your students today, train those well, and plan to add one or two more a grading period down the road. When you’re ready to add, you can spend a few days training the whole group at the start of a new quarter, or you can introduce the new activity through your Meet with the Teacher blocks, one small group at a time.

Fewer activities means a shorter cycle. A 7-day cycle might be word search (2 days), Meet with the Teacher, word study notebook, word sorting and self-quiz, then assessment. A 9-day cycle adds a games day and the Writer’s Notebook day.

Why this matters: Everything you do in the next two weeks is training students on the activities you picked today. If you haven’t decided, you’ll end up training a routine you don’t actually run. And a cyclical schedule is flexible to the realities of school schedules that sometimes (often!) have to change. When a day gets eaten, you don’t scrap an activity, you just pick up where you left off next time.

Not sure what to pick? I break down every option in my post on the 9 activities for your word study routine.

Grab my customizable word study schedule template in Google Slides. It’ll prompt you to make your own copy, and there are 7-day and 9-day versions mapped out with five groups.

THEN GATHER YOUR MATERIALS AND SET UP YOUR WORD STUDY SPACE

Some of this prep you can do right now, and some of it has to wait until your inventories are scored. (You can’t print a group’s first unit when you don’t know yet who is in it.)

What you can absolutely do before students walk in:

Set up the physical space where materials will live. One basket, binder, or magazine file per group (plan for four or five, even though you don’t know who’s in them yet), a cup of same-color pencils, highlighters, and a spot for manipulatives.
Decide how students will hold onto their work. Composition notebooks, two-pocket folders, binders, or printed booklets stapled by unit all work.
Run a CLASS SET of your model word list materials. Everybody works from the same list during your training phase, so this is the one set of copies you can make without a single piece of data. My Free Word Study Launch Guide gives you the word search, the Unlock the List page, the sorting charts, the game, and the posters for Within Word Pattern Sort 52, ready to print.
Print your expectation posters and get them up on the wall.

Get the Free Word Study Launch Guide

Transform students’ spelling abilities with pattern-focused learning that actually sticks! Get your free word study launch guide and resources to implement a word study routine that frees you up for small-group magic ✨.

What waits until you’ve scored the inventory:

Your leveled copies. You can’t print a group’s first unit until you know which unit that group is starting, and you won’t know that until those inventories are scored. So this happens during your training phase, while your whole class is working from the model list and the schedule has not launched yet. You’ve got days for it.

When I get to that point, I print the word searches and word study notebook pages for one whole unit for each group. I like the half-sheet word searches, so I copy enough for each group, cut them in half, and paper clip each set with the correct sort copies into that group’s binder. One student from each group can be responsible for grabbing them when it’s time.

I use marble composition notebooks: word search glued on the left side, the right side saved for recording words as they find them, then word study notebook sheets glued in after that, with two blank pages left for small group notes and assessments before the next word search goes in. (If you go the booklet route, print your word searches one sided so students still have blank space for sorts and meeting notes.)

Why this matters: You will not have the mental bandwidth to build an organizational system while you’re in the middle of launching one. Deciding where things live and how work gets stored before Day 1 means that when your groups finally exist, all you’re doing is dropping folders into place.

I walk through my exact center setup, including the two-pocket folder system, in my post on organizing word study games and centers.

PHASE 1: THE ASSESSMENT PHASE (DAYS 1-3)

Phase 1 has exactly ONE job: get assessment data in hand. No groups, no rotation, no centers. Just you, a stack of paper, and twenty-four kiddos spelling words.

ADMINISTER THE SPELLING INVENTORY DURING YOUR FIRST THREE DAYS

Give the Engaged Spelling Inventory during your first three days. This inventory builds on the 24-word Words Their Way inventory and contains 64 words spanning the Late Letter-Name Alphabetic to the Derivational Relations Stage. It will give you specific insight into the instructional level of your students and which word study units they are ready to start. You may need 3 sessions of 15-20 minutes to complete this assessment for all students. Call out the words, have students spell them.

Why this matters: The inventory is the only thing standing between you and truly differentiated word lists. Everything in Phase 2 and Phase 3 depends on this data, so it needs to happen early, even if scoring waits.

👉 ENGAGED SPELLING INVENTORY

PHASE 2: THE TRAINING PHASE (DAYS 4-10)

This is the phase that buys you the whole rest of the year. Everybody works from the same word list, and you teach ONE activity at a time, modeling it in whole group before you ever expect a student to do it independently.

I use Within Word Pattern Sort 52: Long I and O Homophones as my model list, and every resource for that list comes to you inside the Free Word Study Launch Guide: the Discovery Word Search, the Unlock the List page, three different ways to sort the words, a partner game, and the self-quiz poster. Homophones are a topic every upper elementary student benefits from reviewing, and it’s a low-risk list that lets you focus on developing your routines instead of the content. (Prefer your own list? Pick something developmentally appropriate for your grade level, ideally one that addresses a spelling “rule” like dropping the y to add -ies.)

One important note before you start counting days. Days 4 through 10 is a map, not a mandate. Your pace depends on your students and on how many activities you chose back at the beginning. Word searches usually take two days. Unlock the List takes one or two. Word sorting takes two, or three or more if you launch the choice board right away. Notebooks take one or two. The self-quiz takes one. Games take a couple. Add those up and you’ll see that a teacher who chose every single activity is going to land past Day 10, while a teacher who chose four activities may be ready to launch sooner. Move at the speed that makes sense for your class.

SCORE YOUR INVENTORY AND SORT YOUR GROUPS WHILE THE TRAINING HAPPENS

You don’t have to pause instruction to do this part. While your whole-group training rolls along, score each student’s inventory, identify their developmental spelling stage, and cluster them into groups. Four or five groups is really the most any of us can juggle well, and most of my upper elementary classes shake out into five spanning Letter Name-Alphabetic through Derivational Relations. Do not agonize over the student who sits between two stages. Place them in the lower group and move them later if they’re ready.

This is also when your leveled copies get made. The moment you know that your yellow group is starting in Within Word Pattern and your green group is starting in Syllables and Affixes, you can print each group’s first unit and load up their binders. Do it before you launch the rotation and Day 1 of your stagger is a non-event.

Why this matters: Groups based on actual spelling data are the whole reason this routine works. Guessing at levels or grouping by reading level puts students on word patterns they’ve already mastered or can’t yet access.

DAYS 4-5: DISCOVERY WORD SEARCHES OR UNLOCK THE LIST

Pick ONE entry activity and model it first. With Discovery Word Searches and Unlock the List, you’ve got two great options to choose from, and they do almost the same job.

Discovery Word Searches are word searches that do not come with a word list. Students hunt for words and record what they find by sorting into categories, which means they discover their own word list and start noticing their focus pattern.

On day 4, keep your directions short. Hand out highlighters, tell students to circle the words they find and record them in their notebook by grouping words that go together, and then turn them loose for a full 15 minutes. Resist the urge to hand over search strategies. You want to see what your kiddos can do on their own first.

Day 5 is your modeling day. Put the word search up on your document camera, split the room into teams, and take turns sharing words found, sorting and recording every word as it comes up so students see exactly what you expect. (“Oh, now I see that I can sort these long o words into two more categories based on their letter patterns.”)

THEN you get into strategies, and the best way in is to ask: what could you try when you feel stuck? Students will come up with some of these themselves, and you can fill in the rest. Search the quadrants where you haven’t found much yet. Look at the words you’ve already found and hunt for more with that same letter pattern. Go line by line when you’re chasing a specific string of letters. And be careful with three-letter words, because little words turn up by accident in every puzzle. (Tell students to look all around a small word before marking it, because “the” might turn out to be the front of “theater.”)

After the initial introduction, let students know that finding all of the words is not required, but that they will find many. You’ll share out the list during small groups.

Unlock the List offers similar discovery work as the word search activity, and many teachers choose to implement both activities. Students get their word list with letters, patterns, or word parts removed and work to “unlock” the words. As they crack a few, they start seeing that same pattern repeat across the list and confidently begin to create words.

You can absolutely add the second one later, or pair them, but for now pick ONE and teach it well. My Free Launch Guide gives you all the tips and tricks for modeling both.

🌟 Why this matters: Both of these are easy to run independently, which makes either one the right first activity. When students can do one activity well without you, you’ve bought yourself the small-group time that everything else depends on.

DAYS 6-7: SET UP YOUR WORD STUDY NOTEBOOKS

Word study notebook activities are where students push their thinking about the words: what do you notice about the way these words are spelled, what do you notice about the sounds, how did that ending change the meaning?

Spend one block getting notebooks physically set up (glue the word search on the left, save the right side for recording words, then place the notebook activity sheets for that sort on the following pages) and one block walking through how to complete the sheets themselves. This may not feel like time well spent, but when your students are organized up front, it is!

The activities within a unit are typically similar, so once you go through the directions for the first sort, students should be able to handle the rest. I use a gradual release here: let students work with a partner on the first sort of a unit, then expect independent work for the ones that follow.

🌟 Why this matters: Notebook activities are designed for independent work, which only pays off if students know exactly what “done” looks like. Ten minutes of modeling now is the difference between a notebook day you can teach through and a notebook day you spend answering the same question five times.

DAYS 8-9: TEACH YOUR WORD SORTING PROCEDURES

Sorting is the heart of word study, and it also has the most moving parts. Plan on one block for the sorting itself and one block for logistics, and add a third if you want to launch the “You Choose” sorts choice board right away.

Model the sort with your class. Students flip through their word slips and whisper read each word, group the words by what they have in common, copy the sort into their notebook with each group labeled by what those words share, then check their spelling against the word slips. Then ask the question that makes this routine stick: can we sort these words another way? Sort again a different way and record that one too. (The Launch Guide gives you three different ways to sort the model list, so your second and third sorts are ready to go.)

The logistics are what save you a month from now:

Where students get their sorts when it’s their day to start a new list (a file folder labeled by group color, prepped for the whole quarter, is my favorite)
When words get cut apart (arrival time is a great answer, so sorting time is protected)
How word slips get stored: a baggie, an envelope, a paper clip, or a pocket stapled inside the notebook
Where and how sorts get recorded, and whether anything gets turned in
Your noise level expectations, and how many times students are expected to sort before they’re “done”

My favorite trick: give every student a different color crayon and have them scribble across the back of their sort page before cutting the words apart. When you find a word slip on the floor, you know exactly whose it is.

This is also where a Catch Up Day earns its keep. Once students know the choice board, “catch up” stops meaning “sit here quietly if you’re finished” and starts meaning “finish what you owe me, then pick a sort.” Nobody is idle, and you get a whole block to pull a group that needs you.

Why this matters: Every minute you spend on procedures now is a minute you get back ten times over once your rotation is running. Unclear expectations about scraps and turn-in spots are what turn a 15-minute block into a 5-minute block.

The Launch Guide includes the “You Choose” sorts choice board plus free direction posters for nine types of sorts: sound, pattern, sound + pattern, OOPS!, parts of speech, number of syllables, “I Can Read My Words,” memory match, and word meaning. Train students on each sort you plan to use, and layer new ones in as the year goes on.

DAY 10: TEACH STUDENTS TO QUIZ THEMSELVES

Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check is how students check their own spelling before the assessment at the end of the cycle. Students turn to a clean page in their word study notebook, stack their word slips face down, and flip one over. Look at the word. Say the word. Cover it up. Write it down. Check it against the slip. Correct spellings get a checkmark. Misspelled words get the correct spelling written right beside the first try.

As students master words, they set those slips aside and keep working the ones they still need. One block is usually plenty here, and you can pair it with a review of another procedure if you have time left over. When your list is meaning based, like the homophone sort, add one more question: do you know what this word means and when you’d use it? (Bye, buy, and by make a strong case for this one.)

One thing to know when you build your actual schedule: this is a training day, but self-quizzing does not usually need a whole day of its own once your routine is running. On my cycle it shares a block with Catch Up Day and the “You Choose” sorts, so students who are caught up quiz themselves while students who owe me work finish it up. The “Hear it/Sort and Spell It” assessment at the end of the cycle is a separate day.

Why this matters: Self-quizzing hands the checking over to students. As they prove they can spell a word, it goes to the side, and what’s left in the pile is exactly what they still need to work on.

The “How to Quiz Yourself” poster is in your Free Word Study Launch Guide, ready to print and post.

IF YOU CHOSE GAMES, TRAIN THEM HERE TOO

Games do not have to wait until later in the year. If a partner game or a hands-on activity made your first-quarter list, it gets trained exactly like everything else: whole group, with your model word list, before anybody plays it independently. (The Launch Guide includes both a partner game and an independent activity for Sort 52, so you can prep a set for every pair and model it with the whole class at once.)

Plan on more than one day here. Teach how to play, how to fill out the recording sheet, what happens to the pieces when the block ends, and what a partner voice sounds like. Then let them play a round while you watch and take notes. (They think they’re playing. You’re watching who understands the pattern.)

This is also the moment to settle your game center organization, because what you’re really teaching students is how to maintain the system you set up.

🌟 Why this matters: A game is the activity most likely to look like free time to a fourth grader. Training the recording sheet and the clean-up is what keeps it an instructional block instead of a loud one.

👉 Prefer to hold games until later? That’s a completely fine choice, and it’s the one I’d make if this is your first year running a rotation. Games work beautifully during Meet with the Teacher time, and you can move them to an independent station whenever you’re ready.

PHASE 3: THE LAUNCH PHASE (DAY 11 AND BEYOND)

Here’s where it all comes together, and where most of us make the same mistake I made for years: launching all five groups on the same day.

First, a word about Day 11. It’s a target, not a deadline. You launch when students have shown you they can handle the expectations you’ve taught, not when the calendar says it’s time. If games were part of your lineup, your Day 11 is probably Day 13. If your kiddos needed extra modeling on sorting, it might be Day 15. All fine.

LAUNCH YOUR STAGGERED ROTATION WITH GROUPS STARTING ON DIFFERENT DAYS

Assign students to their groups and start ONE additional group on the rotation each day. Group one begins their word search (or Unlock the List if that’s the one you chose to implement first) on Monday, group two on Tuesday, and so on. Students who haven’t started their rotation yet read independently until their turn comes.

Then post your schedule where everyone can see it and put a student in charge of moving a “We are on day ___” card each day. Students know which group they’re in, they check the schedule for their activity, and they get to work without asking you.

🌟 Why this matters: Starting all five groups on the same day means five groups needing your attention simultaneously. Staggering the launch means you’re only ever troubleshooting one new group at a time, and your “meet with the teacher” days fall naturally onto different days, which is the whole point.

👉 This is the piece I get the most questions about, and I mapped out the whole thing (red arrows and all) in my post on setting up a staggered word study schedule.

TRAIN MEET WITH THE TEACHER AT THE TABLE

Meet with the Teacher is the one routine you can’t rehearse on the carpet, because it doesn’t exist until your groups do. So it gets trained in your first few meetings.

Decide ahead of time where you’ll gather, what you want within arm’s reach (mini whiteboards, dry erase markers, a binder of notebook paper, extra pencils and highlighters), and what students bring with them: word study notebook, pencil, highlighter, and their baggie of words. Then teach the part that makes or breaks your small group time, which is what students do the SECOND they sit down. Keep hunting for words in the word search, sort your words, turn to your last sort and start listing what you notice. Whatever you choose, train it, and feel free to assign something different depending on the group’s level. Your Launch Guide includes a Meet with the Teacher expectations poster, plus a blank version if you want to write your own.

While you’re at it, decide your signals for the rest of the class. How will you quietly tell the room the noise is creeping up, or remind a student that you’re unavailable right now?

Why this matters: Students who arrive and wait for directions burn three minutes of a fifteen minute meeting. Multiply that by five groups and a whole school year, and you’ve lost HOURS of small group instruction to kiddos sitting quietly, waiting.

CLOSE EACH CYCLE WITH THE “HEAR IT/SORT AND SPELL IT” ASSESSMENT

The last day of a group’s cycle is their assessment. You call the words, students sort them into their categories and spell them as they go. Because they’re sorting while they spell, you learn something a plain spelling test can’t tell you: whether they understand the pattern or just the words.

The staggered schedule is what makes this manageable. Because your groups are a day apart, only ONE group is sitting on its assessment day at a time. You pull those four or five students to your meeting table, call their words, and the rest of the class works their own assignments the way you trained them to.

About once per cycle, that assessment day is going to land on the same day as another group’s Meet with the Teacher day. It’s just math, and there’s no way to schedule around it on a 7, 8, or 9 day cycle, so plan for it instead. The assessment group comes to the table first. While you call their words, your meeting group sits down and starts their arrival task. (THIS is why you train an arrival task.) Twenty words takes about five minutes. Then the assessment group heads back to their seats and you turn to the group already working in front of you.

What the assessment group does next: they reset for their new word list. Turn in the assessment, cut apart the word slips for the next list, glue the new word search onto the left side of the notebook, set up the pages behind it, and clear out the old word slips and loose papers. Anyone who finishes the reset reads independently until the block ends.

One rule I hold firm here: reset only, no starting the new list. If students begin hunting words in that new word search, they are half a day ahead of where the schedule card says they are, and your whole rotation starts to drift.

Why this matters: Ten quiet minutes of prep at the end of a cycle is what keeps scissors out of Day 1 of the next one. Every group finishes ready to start, which means you never spend a word study block watching twenty-four kiddos cut paper.

ADD SPELLING HOMEWORK ONCE THE IN-CLASS ROUTINE IS HUMMING

Now is the time to bring families in. Your students know their word lists, they know their patterns, and the take-home list and sort reinforces work they’re already doing. Send it home once, and your homework routine becomes one more thing that runs itself.

WORD LISTS & HOMEWORK ROUTINE

Letter Name Weekly Spelling Homework

Within Word Weekly Spelling Homework

Syllables & Affixes Weekly Spelling HW

Derivational Weekly Spelling Homework

INTRODUCE EVERY NEW GAME THROUGH MEET THE TEACHER

Whether games were in your first-quarter lineup or you’re adding them now, each NEW game gets introduced the same way. I don’t drop a new game into a center and hope for the best. I introduce it during Meet with the Teacher, watch students play a round with a partner, and answer their questions. (They think I’m teaching them a game. I’m also informally assessing and teaching the word study concept inside it.) THEN it goes into the rotation.

Because the games are leveled, this is the only way it can work once your groups are differentiated anyway. Your Within Word Pattern group and your Derivational Relations group are not playing the same game, so the small group table is where each one learns theirs.

Once you’ve got a few games in circulation, you’ll want a system. Here’s how I organize my word study games and center area.

KEEP ADDING, QUARTER BY QUARTER

Your first quarter schedule should look different from your second, third, and fourth quarter schedule. Mine always does.

Remember that list of activities you chose from before Day 1? You picked the ones that made sense for your launch. As students grow in their word study levels and in their ability to handle the tasks already in their routine, go back to that list and add one. Maybe it’s Writer’s Notebook Day. Maybe it’s the games center. Maybe it’s a Catch Up Day with “You Choose” sorts, which is a beautiful low-prep way to give students choice while you catch up with a group.

You’ve got two good ways to train the new one. Spend a few days at the start of a quarter modeling it whole group, exactly the way you did in Phase 2. Or introduce it group by group during Meet with the Teacher, which costs you no whole-class time at all.

Why this matters: A rotation that includes activities students haven’t been trained on will collapse, and you’ll blame the rotation instead of the training. Adding activities gradually also keeps the routine from going stale, which is a real thing a few months in.

When you’re ready for that step, here’s the full 7, 8, or 9 day cycle that you’re working toward.

YOUR LAUNCH CHECKLIST

Decide which activities your word study cycle will include and how many days it will take
Set up your word study space and copy a class set of your model list materials before Day 1
DAYS 1-3: Give your spelling inventory
DAYS 4-10: Run a whole-group word list and train ONE activity at a time
Score the inventory, sort students into four to five groups, and print each group's first unit while training continues
DAYS 4-5: Model Discovery Word Searches or Unlock the List
DAYS 6-7: Set up notebooks and model the notebook activities
DAYS 8-9: Teach your sorting procedures, including Catch Up Day and "You Choose" sorts
DAY 10: Teach Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check
If games are in your first-quarter lineup, model one whole group before you launch
DAY 11+: Stagger your group start days and launch the rotation
Train Meet with the Teacher expectations during your first small group meetings
Teach your end-of-cycle reset so each group starts its next list ready to go
Start your spelling homework routine once the in-class rotation is running
Add new activities as the year goes on, quarter by quarter

A LITTLE PEP TALK BEFORE YOU GO

Most upper elementary schedules only give us a 15 to 20 minute word study block, which makes it awfully tempting to skip the training and jump straight to the good stuff. I promise you, the days you spend up front are what buy you a word study block you actually look forward to for the rest of the year.

And if Day 11 arrives and your rotation is a hot mess? Back up. Spend a few more days modeling. Nobody is grading you on how fast you got there, and I give you full permission to launch on Day 15 instead.

Remember: you can start this on the first day of school. You can start it the week you get back from a track out. You can start it in the middle of a quarter when you’ve had enough of your current spelling routine. The phases work whenever you decide to start them.

Your word study block is going to be one of your favorite parts of the day. Hang in there while you build it!