Neither of my boys do well with a plain workbook approach. Neither of them are strongly suited in the auditory department. Their best learning method is visual and hands-on. Once I discovered this I tried to come up with creative ideas.
Visual Word Cards
For my struggling learner, I used some ideas from Dianne Craft, MA, CNHP. First, I give my son a pretest. He isn't allowed to see the words. I simply give him the test--letting him know that he won't be graded on it! This is for my benefit. The pretest allows me to see what words he is going to struggle with and what I need to focus on.This test also helps me prepare his visual Word Cards. I take the words he spelled wrong, and write the letters he missed (or used incorrectly) in red and the other letters in black. This helps the missed or incorrect letters stand out to him...visually.
Let's say he spelled the word light like this: liet. I would write the letters L ... I ... and T in black marker. Than I would write GH in red marker. To finish it off, I draw a little picture on the card, something to cue him in on what the word is.
Dianne Craft, goes into a lot more detail in her videos on her website. And I don't always do every step that she covers. But even this method has helped my son.
Letter Chips
Obviously we needed a hands-on method to review spelling. I bought letter cubes for the the boys. They enjoyed those. But it took awhile for them to spell words because they had to turn the cubes around to look for the certain letter they needed. It took time, and they didn't like the slow nature of the constant looking.
Then I had an idea. We had a set of poker chips that we weren't using. So I took the poker chips, a roll of masking tape, and a black marker and proceeded to make Letter Chips. Each chip received a piece of masking tape. On the masking tape, I wrote a letter or group of letters as needed.
Now the boys didn't have to turn cubes over to find a letter. They just had to look at the face of the chip. In fact, Christmas time allowed me to finally find a perfect container to organize the chips. I took a container with dividers (meant for storing ornaments) and turned it into our Letter Chip Container. It's perfect!
Not only does this method help the boys with their spelling, I've also used it to help them sound out words. I put consonant digraphs (th, sh, ch, wh) together on one chip as well as vowel pairs and suffixes. It's made a world of difference.
And... It's a lot more fun!