How to help DD with spellings

[Chestnutx3]

Teachers says DD needs to improve her spelling. There seems lots of reference to spelling lists not improving spelling but not much information on what does.

DD bursts into tears when I correct any spelling in her written work. Anything I can do that will work? I'm a bit at a loss really. Often she will spell words correctly in a test but not in a story.

DD have a very very good reading age so her spelling lagging far behind has made the teacher concerned.

[learnandsay]

Make crossword puzzles for her.

[Mashabell]

Reading lagging behind spelling is common, because learning to spell is so much harder, as so many words have random letters.

I bet that most of the spellings she gets wrong are the irregular ones. So u can point out what's tricky about them, rather than just correcting them.

Learning the most common ones is helpful, because it cuts down on mistakes.

I'll paste in the ones from the 300 most used English words which have tricky bits in them. I could PM them to u with the tricky bits picked out in bold (as I cannot do on here), if u think it might help.

U could get your dd to look a few at time and tell u what's tricky about them, what needs special attention.

141 of the 300 most used English words (as listed in Letters and Sounds) have tricky spellings:

again, great, they, -
after, are, asked, can?t, fast, last, laughed, plants,

• air, bear, their, there, there?s, where, - were,
  any, many, said, head, ready, friends, - every, everyone,
  
  been, feet, green, keep, need, queen, sea, see, sleep, three, tree, trees, even, here, these, each, eat, please, tea, key, be, he, he?s, me, she, we, we?re, people,
  
  

• it?s, - - eyes, find, I, I?ll, I?m, I?ve, night, right, -
  

gone, want, wanted, was, what - before, more, your, door,

• all, called, because, saw, small, water, thought -
  

first, birds, work, girl

• don?t, most, oh, only, grow, know, snow, window, boat -
  

do, into, to, two, who, through, you, school, -
could, couldn?t, would, pulled, put,

• another, coming, mother, once, other, come, one, some, something -
  

house, mouse, down, town -
when, which, while, why, - eggs, giant, magic, -
across, horse, let?s, that?s, - of, off, -
have, live,
lived, animals, dragon, very, (without doubled consonants)

Mr, Mrs, suddenly,

[sandk]

A game such as Dicey spellings

This book Games for Writing might be useful.

It seems to be a jolly long haul though, one minute has my DS seemingly "got" the spelling of a word, the next it seems to fall out of his head again....

[Mashabell]

The irregular spellings keep falling out of children's heads because there is no logic to them. It's simply a matter of imprinting them on their minds. It takes time and lots of repetitions for them to become automatic.

[Jux]

You could try writing words she is finding hard to remember in large letters on index cards and blu-tacking them to the wall opposite where she sits. I did this with dd, but never really tested her, just made sure she could see them whenever she looked up. It did work.

[Thingymajigs]

It can be a bit pricey but you could try WordShark on a laptop/pc. We got hold of an older version (WordShark 3) on eBay after seeing how much my son loved using it at school. It makes spelling quite fun and you can alter the difficulty as well as add your own word lists.