How do teachers teach spellings?

[gabid]

There seem to be a number of threads about spelling lists and a lot of you say that they don't work - children learn for the test and then don't use the correct spellings in their writing, but still schools are sending them home.

You can use little acronyms ... and how else do you (primary teachers) teach spelling? What works?

My Ds is in Y1 and has his 40 words for the term. We have used magnetic letters, coloured posters, spelling games on the computer, look-cover-write-check ...but he always gets bored quickly.