Learning Spellings of Homophones

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My year 3 son is struggling with his spellings this week and I am struggling to help him.

He has a list of 5 homophones.

The ones that are more common he is getting the hang of quicker, such as write/right and new/knew

But he is struggling with the less commonly used ones.

It is adding to confusion because not only is he having to remember the spellings of tricky words that don't conform to the phonetic way they have been taught to read, he is then having to remember two ways of spelling a word that sounds the same to him.

I have tried discussing the meanings with him, looking for the differences in the spelling of the words, the look/cover/write/check method and had him copying them over and over but the trickier words are not sticking.

Does anyone have any advice on how to help him? I am planning on discussing it with his teacher when I get the chance.

I am wondering whether it maybe isn't the best method to teach them together

I think we had that list last week! Is he using each word in a sentence, so he is learning the context as well? We started by doing one after the other, so it didn't matter which answer was given first, just to check that both were known, but then I went on to say a sentence including the word, so it required picking the correct version before spelling it out.

I couldn't think of any other way to do it!

Easy - we tried that too. That's what I meant by discussing the meanings. We talked about the different meanings and then put them into a sentence.

Looking again at the list it looks like it might be the ones that are spelt similarly that are catching him out.

Euphemia - he is struggling with piece/peace and break/brake and accept/except.

He remembers piece but then goes blank on how he should spell peace even though we've been looking at the spellings since Friday now. He has the hang of brake but then goes blank on break. With accept/except he wants to put an S in them.

He is very good at his spellings normally and is in the top group for his class. They have been having 4 homophones and 4 topic related spellings and he has had hardly any problems with the 4 topic related questions. It has just been the homophones which have really been confusing him.

Thanks Euphemia. I am a teaching assistant myself but for Infants so haven't dealt with Junior spellings yet, so a lot of the above are familiar to me already. Some look good for my son.