Another Yr1 spellings thread - sorry

[SlightlyMadScientist2plus2plus]

DTDs have just brought there spellings home for the week. Amongst them they have house, wanted & BUILT.

I just don't know how to help them. The list this week has no pattern like preious weeks. How do you teach a five year old that built has a 'u' in it, or that the 'a' in wanted actually sounds like a 'o'.

um - maybe the approach is to say - these don't go they way they sound - and just write them out and teach them to recognise the whole word.

When I was at school I used to do really with with spelling tests by writing the word, covering it up, writing it again and checking, and just reapeating it over and over again. I found that eventually I would just be able to feel how the word should be written, so my hand was kind of doing it by itself.

Same as schnapps - our school is actively encouraging "Look-Cover-Write-Check".

we don't do spellings at all and he's year 1?

are they learning through phonics? .. ours are and I am wondering when spelling will come into it .. he writes phonetically a lot of the time

Spellings i can cope with - ds1 is coming home with times tables now...

Ds1 did Jolly Phonics. A lot of the apellings seem to be on a theme eg "sh" or "ch", but our teacher also throws in words which are being commonly misspelled in classwork.

How about making up a mnemonic for 'difficult' words, such as Bugs Under Igloos Love Toast? This works with my dd.

Loving the bugs one.

They are doing some phonetics & patterns, which the previous spellings have all been based on e.g sh ch ll ss. If the words follow the phonetics rules they find them easy - so long as they are taught the relevant rules for the sh ch etc. This lot are just really random with some unusual sounds for them to pick up. Done our first run through and they coped a lot better than expected. We will see how it goes through the week.

My dd is in year 1 and they have spellings too. I find that, having been well taught in phonics, she recognises how most words should 'look' so she will write it how it sounds then 'tweak' it so it looks right.

Built is part of the family where the 'u' is silent so you could focus on those eg guilt, guile (magic 'e'), etc) so they have knowledge of as many as you can think of with the same spelling pattern ( rather than having to go throught the whole 'recognition' process every time!)

I'm sorry. I don't even know what guile means - how do I explain that to a 5 year old.

They have sussed there is a silent letter in there - but one thinks it is 'e' & the other thinks it is 'a'. We still have 5 days to work on that though. At least they get the idea there is a silent letter.

They have not done very much phonics at all beyond the basic 26 letters of hte alphabet - which is what is pissing me off about these spellings.

I am trying to 'teach' them some phonics as they get them - just done 'ou' for house. I just don't think that should be my job.

I just don't know how to explain the silent 'u'.

I wouldn't explain guile to a 5-year-old either -it's asking for trouble . I don't think you need explain the silent "u" either - just tell your children that English spelling reflects history as much as pronunciation.