Spellings. Do teachers teach them or are parents expected to?

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My child is in year 4 and every week comes home with a list of spellings to learn. Long words like immeasurable, illegible, irresponsible etc. Each week they go through these once in class by using a word search or similar but that's it, once. Is this the norm? My child doesn't find spelling easy and we are spending 20 minutes each day just on spellings. That's without reading, century tech, mathletics, times tables rock stars and weekend homework. Does this sound about right?

The teacher will teach the spelling pattern/rule then the children practice them in different ways. Then it is down to practicing at home. The spellings are hard too.

I’m in Wales (Welsh language school, so taught in Welsh), so may be slightly different. However, so far, we only have reading as homework. 20 minutes is an inordinate amount of time to spend on one task with five others also needing to be done. My son of the same age has ADHD, so perhaps that clouds my opinion a bit as it’s hard enough to get him to manage the reading (we get it done, but it takes a long time and we’ve only just moved past stand off stage in favour of a token), but that amount of homework would hugely eat into after school time - especially if extra curricular activities or clubs go on too. I just can’t see how the children would have any time to relax and digest school, let alone play!

(Edited to include the school is Welsh as likely to make a difference)

20 minutes a day?! What on earth are you doing bombarding her with it til she gets them right?

At my school we teach a daily spelling program for 20 or so minutes. Then there is a list to learn at home but not much pressure on this.

I personally think that the National Curriculum spelling and grammar is much too hard. Probably written by some weird Michael Gove zealot type who thinks children should be learning Latin from three. Schools haven't really worked out how to teach spelling as English is such a complicated language and the spellings are insane.

So don't stress if they find them tricky because they are! I'd chat to the teacher about what the expectation is but I would expect them to be doing a bit more in school. 20 mins a day at home sounds like too much and stuff like reading and times tables are more important IMO.

The teacher should teach the pattern (eg double consonant with the negative prefix). It’s a standard national curriculum list, but if your child needs a differentiated list (ie if they don’t yet know spellings from previous years), I would ask for it.
You are being given a LOT of homework. I would ask the teacher how they’d like you to prioritise it. Probably this year times tables are most critical.

At DD1’s school we had weekly spelling lists and a test on Mondays.

At DD2’s school we were given a list at the start of the year, but there is no testing.

So it depends on the school. But I can confirm that DD1 was far ahead of DD2 at the same age.

The max that was expected at Primary was to write them. Extra bonus if this was in a creative way. Took 20 mins tops per week. 20 mins per day seems unnecessary.

Used to practice them with ds the day before the "test" or while we walked to school. We weren't aiming for perfection but he used to get most right when it mattered in class. You're doing too much OP!

Mine went to the same school, 20 words a week - dd1 would generally know them from the classroom (the teacher would go through them) dd2 would practice daily and still fail the test on Monday, she's dyslexic. School just want them to try and it's so important for other subjects to have a good vocabulary

No, my dc are years 4&5 and I test their spellings the evening before their spelling test and they usually get 8/9 out of 10 right so they must practice at school.

My eldest is also in Y4 so I feel your pain! It feels like a massive step up in terms of homework this year and I know there have been a few tears over it in our class, so definitely not just us struggling.

My experience of spellings is that they given them out and two weeks later there's a test. Last year we had a book to write them out 3 times and then right in a sentence and that worked reasonably well, but this year they're just expected to learn them somehow!

To be honest, we do look at the together but we prioritise reading, writing and music practice over spellings (the former two because they help with spelling anyway and the latter for mental health)

I'll speak to his teacher because it's causing a lot of stress. He's not a fast worker but with regular practise he does get most if not all correct. The advice was to wrists them 3 times each. He missed a lot of school time due to illness and covid and was supposed to have catch up sessions but only had a few minutes a week in a group with those with additional needs such as adhd rather than a covid catch up group. It feels like a lot of stress for him and for me.

To all those saying its too much practice, I'm guessing you've got kids while can spell.
DS1 would have taken 20 mins to copy out the spelling list, correct the errors, and then try to write them from memory - again correcting the whole list errors. It was torture, but about the only way we had a chance of getting high enough marks to prevent him missing g play time to "learn his spellings".
It comes easy to many, but for others isn't a pointless time wasting excerise. He still cant spell KS1wrds routinely - and sirs his GCSE's next year.
Yes, he's dyslexic.

Practice at home

We get a list of the spellings the children are expected to know at the end of each year. I write 3 down a week on a chalkboard by the kitchen and then ask them if they can remember a few days later. Has worked well for us.

A side note but I wonder if there might be some indicators of dyslexia here.

My DS struggled with spelling in primary school, unlike his sister who only needed to read through them once or twice. What worked for us was splitting them up. I wrote the words out on individual small cards and then we spent no more than 5 minutes a day practising just 3 or 4, and no pressure. This was less overwhelming than tackling a list of 20.

DD is in yr5 now but we struggled a lot with spellings initially. What worked for us was stopping the writing of them completely. I bought magnetic letters and we did all her practice on the fridge. Much quicker than writing and easier to correct.
I also did silly pronunciation of bits of words to help her remember eg measure is said me-a-sure to remember the a in it as it's not pronounced. Or linking the spelling to something eg she can spell here, and knows 'where is it? Is it there? No, it's here' to remember the correct spelling of the group. Works best for homophones. Eg see has two eyes, sea has a wave at the end in the letter a.
It sounds complicated but it worked for her as only a few words a week.
I also made her practice before school and after school every day as they were given spellings on Monday for test on Friday.
My main hate now is that the long list of spellings she can get right in a spelling test, she can't translate into words in a piece of writing!!!

When I was in school we had a list of 10 words to learn to spell each week, it was a 10 minute task twice a week at the absolute most, once the day we got the list and once the day before the test. It might be worth reaching out to the teacher or other parents and seeing if the other children are struggling this much with it too? Maybe your little one needs additional support?

I'd speak to school about what their expectations are.
Are they actually asking you to do 20 minutes of spellings, 10 minutes reading, don't know what century tech is but say 10 minutes on that, 10 minutes on TTRockStars, 15 minutes on mathletics every school day?

Reading is 10 minutes a day, times tables is 5 minutes a day, mathletics and century tech don't have time frames given but it easily adds up to an hour a day during the week. We get home at 4, homework for an hour, dinner, shower, bed time story and bed. If he wants to play out with his friends there's no time for homework. I'm a single parent and there's no one else to be doing dinner or clearing up or anything else whilst I'm helping ds with homework.

An hour and 15 minutes of homework a day for a year 4 is ridiculous! My year 4 has spellings, a maths sheet, a GPS sheet, TT Rocks and reading. Reading is however much we want (they don't have specific reading scheme anymore)but everyday, dd does hers at bedtime. The other stuff probably amounts to an hour a week.