Gotcha. Well, on the coloring I tend to be against it (I was lambasted here a while ago for daring to suggest that it could stunt creativity). So I would tend to be glad for your kid that he doesn't like to do it.
As for spelling, DS5 finds it dull to practice too. He does seem like to whip out words he finds cool and announce that he can spell them, but in terms of structured lessons, he can't stand them. For most words, it has turned out that he can remember the correct spelling from his reading, but he's not perfect.
Our current deal is that every so often I will pull up a word list of 500 or so and we will plow through them to shore up any weak points (we did one just Sunday, actually). Then we don't discuss spelling for quite a while. Maybe you could try speeding through it in a short mega-dose like that and see if your son likes it. Or you could just work on vocabulary and reading comp., and see if he starts naturally remembering correct spellings.
