I’m not going to go into a great deal of detail in this post about the teaching of spelling (there is book loads of things to be said about the subject, after all); I am going to share with you some simple tips that have worked for me in helping most children achieve spelling success in the primary classroom.
To be a good speller you need to have had lots of exposure to words, and have a good idea about how they work, in terms of their construction, history and meaning. You need to have a good memory, and, certainly in school, good fine motor control (so that when you write the words down, they bear a resemblance to what you were intending to write in the first place).
Getting spellings embedded in the memory is easier for some people than others; some seem to have an almost instantaneous, visual affinity for words, others remain flummoxed by letters for the whole of their lives. The key, for most people, in getting those spellings to stick, is terribly dull and not magical at all – it is practice, practice, practice – but just because it is repetitive, that doesn’t mean we have to make it a dull exercise in the classroom and only ever practice in the same way (after all, we want to be getting all of the children involved in the exercise, not just those who happen to like doing things in our preferred way).
Don’t let it drag on too long
I have used various times to get the children practising their spellings. During the register, when they are coming in to the classroom for their lesson; it’s a great way to settle everyone down and do something productive – while also ensuring that those children who don’t ‘do their spellings’ at home still get a chance to do their best. Little and often, like most practice, is much more effective than no attention to spelling all week and then one big splurge either at the end or the beginning of the week.
Mix up your methods
As a young teacher, I pretty much stuck to the trusty old ‘look, cover, write, check’, but since those halcyon days, I have discovered a whole other realm of ways to get children to look at and learn words. These are only a few suggestions for quick ways you could look at your target words in class.
- Write the word and draw a little picture next to it to show you know what it means.
- Play a ‘which word am I thinking of game’. Put all the words on the board and give the children clues.
- Use flashcards – hold the word up on a card or mini-white board and then hide it. The children must then write it down.
- Use mini-white boards to get them to write down the target word as many times as they can in 20 seconds (thanks to Pie Corbett for that one).
- Call out a word for the children to write down.
- Count the letters.
- Look for vowels and consonants.
- Use ‘sound buttons’ (or what ever you call them), that is, put a dot or a line under the sounds the letters make in the word.
- Sound out the words (and count the sounds)
- Count the syllables in the words.
- Say the word in a sentence.
- Write the word in a sentence.
It doesn’t have to be about the spelling test
One of the most frustrating things about spelling, as a teacher, is when your class get all their words right in a test – and then don’t apply that knowledge to the rest of their work. Spelling tests are a long-lived tradition in English schools, so you may not be able to get away without carrying one out on a Friday afternoon, but there are ways to make the test more effective.
- Get the children to choose the words they want to be tested on, based on the work you are doing in class.
- Get the children to identify, and articulate, why the words they have chosen are the most tricky (it may be better to tell them that they are picking the most difficult words, rather than the words for the test, otherwise, they might just pick the simplest).
- Get the children to pick, and articulate, the method they will use to learn a word.
- Get the children to test each other, in pairs.
Mnemonics
Now, I don’t know about you, but sometimes, the mnemonic becomes more important than the word and children can get distracted by them. Personally, I keep them to a minimum in the primary classroom.
Mark for spelling
As a trainee teacher, I discussed with my fellow trainees the relative merits of marking for spelling. We were agreed that for a child to find their work covered in teacher pen, and every single spelling highlighted as WRONG was disheartening, and the last thing we wanted to do was discourage children from putting pen or pencil to the page, so we agreed that three spellings per piece of work was probably the maximum you would want to highlight.
Today, we seem to be teaching in an age where the Learning Objective is King, and, as such, some teachers have found themselves marking only against the LO and not commenting on spelling at all. I wouldn’t recommend this as an effective use of feedback. Primary children particularly have a lot to learn as far as spelling is concerned, and we need to give them plenty of chances to learn.
If children make spelling errors on words they really ought to know, and if they continue to make those errors, marking for spelling is one way to help them to sort it out. Writing the word out correctly at the bottom of their work and requiring them to write the word out three times usually sorts any niggles out.
Attach meaning
There are lots of ways that you can do this, but basically the idea is not just to make sure that the children understand the word you are asking them to spell, but also to attach a little story to those they find tricky. One of the stories I tell is about Little Friendly ‘I’ in friend. It likes to cuddle in between ‘r’ and ‘e’. Once you get started you can make up lots of these, or the children could make up their own.
Another way you can attach meaning, as in, making spelling correctly a meaningful exercise, is to make sure that you make connections with the other things you are learning in class. This ensures that spelling doesn’t become a separate exercise and is, instead, integral to everything that is going on in class (see also: marking for spelling).
Articulation
You can sound out the individual sounds in words (which links nicely to work with phonics) and you can also say words in funny ways to help children to remember the spelling. Wednesday, February, vegetable and friend are all good for this.
Tried and tested methods
‘I’ before ‘e’ (I know it doesn’t work for all words, but it is helpful.
Their and there both start with ‘the’.
Where is all about place, so it has ‘here’ inside.
These are just a few ways that you can try to build spelling practice into your teaching day, keeping in mind the ‘little and often’ principle. There’s plenty more to say, both about the study of words and the teaching of spelling to SEND children that I haven’t covered in this post.
Class Teaching Tips 