'Ridiculous' words in Year 3 spelling tests.

[Oblomov]

Ds has a spelling test every tuesday. They have a sheet of 24 words that they write every day. On friday it comes home and we talk about it, go over it, over the weekend. Then on tuesday he has the test.

But the last few words in the list, over the last few weeks, have been so hard that I think they are ridiculous. This week they start off with : car, poem, rhyme, rhthym, but wait for it, then then go onto :
alliteration
and this is the one
onomatopoeia.

I showed it to dh. He said, 'you've got to be kidding'. I said ' they are only 8. This is wrong.'
What do you think?

My ds1 has been given quite a few words he didn't understand - as I've said, I don't object to that, because he has to put them into sentences, so has to understand them by the end of the week. However, if it came to a choice between learning onomatopoeia and learning how to spell definitely and separately, I would favour the latter two commonly misspelled words being learnt, because they are more likely to appear in a job application....

Our teacher (year three) takes the spelling words from each child's writing so this week my dd had 'when' and 'environmentally' on her list.

(or should I say, misspelt and learnt, for consistency!...)

Interesting, then, that there are apparently 3 different approaches to weekly spelling lists: correcting something in the child's writing; word patterns; and words used during the week in the lessons. The first approach sounds impressively personalised.

I have boys in Year 3 and have had similar shock at the content of their spelling tests. One week, they both had 'and' and 'do' in their lists!!! Alongside that, they had 'demolition' and 'congregation'.

I am totally ambivalent about homework in primary school anyway. I never had homework until I went to secondary school. I just enjoyed my free time and played with my friends and siblings. Getting homework was something that bigger boys and girls did at big school. I don't think it did me any harm at all in truth.

Oooh nostalgia is a wonderful thing!! (I do resent the time that my 8 year olds have to spend doing homework at weekends though!)

Y2 son had

Unconscious
Displeasure

Recently!
There was a melt down...

The words provoked great displeasure in your household, then...

I didn't get homework at primary school, either. It was, indeed, lovely.

I would love my DD to have 24 spellings in English per week, and they sound just about right to me

So we can add a fourth approach to spelling tests - only do them if your child indicates that they actually want to, and only then, if they don't have anything better to do. It is so liberating!

I suspect that it won't have very much impact on the quality of their job applications in later life if I am absolutely honest.

Can your yr 3 kids actually spell words like these?? Really interested....DS (nearly 8) struggles with spellings and has daily 1-1 with the TA doing Word Wasp to help him. He also gets 10 words home a week, but things like "when, there, God, fall". He got "fall" and "God" wrong last week :( I didn't think he was that far behind, but I guess he really is :(

Honestly, I think my Year 3 sons learn to spell words for the test that follows and then forget then. They remember the words that crop up frequently in Harry Potter (really useful ones like like Dumbledore, Quidditch and McGonegall) Spelling tests are all just exam-focused training in my view, and far too early to instil neurosis - in the kids or indeed, us as parents.

Children will learn to spell if they are encouraged to read right enough. I truly sympathise that you are feeling bad about your son's achievement (Mrs Baffled) when he has barely started primary school. It really is far too early to even think about choosing appropriate words for job applications and the like. We all know don't we that children will learn far more from exploring with their parents and the world around them at this age?

Ds has been using the word 'alliteration' in his verbal language since reception - so it doesn't sound out of the way to learn how to spell it in Yr 3. Onomatopoeia only came up this year I think (Yr2) but he does definitely know what it means - he wouldn't have a hope of spelling it yet though!

Sadly not all children learn to spell by reading. DS is a truly avid reader (6 months ago assessed as 11.5 years with comprehension 12 years) devouring novels in a few hours, but he just can't spell. He has had vision problems, but these have been fixed by vision therapy, so I am hoping his spelling will catch up soon.....here's hoping, anyway! School are doing all they can to help (he's on SA+ with an IEP), but it's not really enough...

Oh those aren't ridiculous! But dd1 did get some awful ones in y3 that just weren't words. I can't remember them exactly, because they seriously weren't real words, or were very rarely used jargon type words. For example, "uncumbrence" could easily have come up. "Competencies" certainly did. "Disambiguous" too. And something that was "dis" when it should have been "un" (like unburdened, iyswim).

It did make me snurkle when my 5 year old referred to "split digraphs" rather than the "magic e words" that my dd1 had had at her age!

Mrsbaffled- we are talking about top group children. No idea what the average would be but my top group daughter often gets keywords wrong and she's a level 4.

^More recently there seems to be an argument that spelling is learned better through word families/ roots (so understanding -ough/ ought words, -tion/ -sion words, prefixes, suffixes, etc...) (e.g. teaching morphemes here: www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/no14_nunes.pdf^

Thats very interesting PSB, dd comes home with similar groups, this week is /tion i.e. dictionary, station, relation etc. (Yr2), I thought it may confuse her, but apparently not!!! However, second and minute at the end of the list confused me!!!!

Good to know the school is keeping up!

I don't see 'sprachgefuhl' on the list, so it seems he is not being overly stretched

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2151255/Lori-Anne-Madison-6-youngest-person-National-Spelling-Bee.html