Oops--sorry I've been away from the board.
The testing out:
Teacher has 2 advanced level lists for him for the 9 weeks. She let DS and a couple other kids take one list home. They can opt to test on all the words now and not have to do spelling for the 9 wks, to go along with the rest of the class. DS scored 81! (he should have studied them more than a look-through), but she said that was adequate to skip them. The second list of words/expressions DS still will work on (no test out)...things like "caveat emptor" and "ad hoc". They're great--many I didn't know. While the other kids get homework in writing words/sentences, he'll work in the Word within a Word book, which i think is roots, prefixes, analogies, usage (basically vocabulary building rather than spelling). I really like this.
