Making spelling practise more fun?

[winklegirl]

No doubt this has come up before, but does anyone have any good ideas for helping to make learning the weekly list of spellings more fun? (DS in year 3)

Thanks, Jo

One of the best ways is simply to encourage your child to read a LOT. I used to read voraciously as a child and was not good about remembering to bring spellings home, let alone learning them. However, I generally did pretty well in spelling tests just because I picked up a lot of spelling as a result of my reading and generally could tell if a word didn't look right.

accident (rather than axident, as in exit)

That doesn't work. Exit is pronounced eczit or egzit, whereas accident is pronounced acsident, not aczident or agzident.

We have a blackboard in the kitchen. On Fridays we write the week's spellings on it, and choose the trickiest as "word of the day". We sing it, write it, spell it out, write it in window condensation, bath crayon, snow.... anywhere for that day. We'll ook at the other words too, and there are usually a few (maybe 3 out of 10) that DS is confident with anyway. The next day we choose a new word, but there is always one stand-out trickiest word that we start with.

One of the best ways is simply to encourage your child to read a LOT. I used to read voraciously as a child and was not good about remembering to bring spellings home, let alone learning them. However, I generally did pretty well in spelling tests just because I picked up a lot of spelling as a result of my reading and generally could tell if a word didn't look right.

This - DS has just had his first set of spellings this year (Y2) and I was surprised at how familiar he was with them (all silent "b" and silent "w" words) already. We haven't done any spellings since the end of last term, but I have encouraged him to read loads. This has been helped by The Guinness Book of Records and his unquenchable appetite for extreme facts.

And why should 'axident' be any better than the current spelling? To be really logical and transparent it should be spelled 'aksident', or, 'acsident'.

Not when you take into account that word's origins - comes from Latin and French.

Don't you sit and wonder what sad, meaningless lives some MNers must have when the highlight of their day is to put a snarky arsehole comment about someone else's SPaG errors on a thread?

Bless.

Thank you InimitableJeeves for illustrating why marsha's spelling reform ideas won't work. I do actually say 'ecsit'; there are absolutely no hard and fast rules about pronunciation of words. So what accent do words get 'respelled' to?

I would agree that 'readingalot' is a good way to identify misspelled words but spelling is about recall of the letters and their order in words. Contrary to what many people believe spelling is not a case of visual recall of the whole word. It is about spelling the sounds in the words. Some people may depend on visual recall but I suspect that is because they have never been taught anything different.

I think that fact that most of the population appear to be bad spellers (ask any secondary teacher; they will tell you that they estimate some 60%+ of their pupils to be bad spellers; though no doubt selective schools may be an exception) doesn't indicate much of a success rate for the visual recall method; or for the 'learning the words as a string of letters' method either.

ThenLaterWhenItGotDark

Oh dear; who outsnarks who?

Should that be "whom" ?!

@IguanaTail

Many good readers struggle with spelling

On day one, DSs copy the words colour coded, green felt tip is for easy words that they already know, orange more difficult and red for killer words. They decide which word goes in which category. Day two we break down the most difficult words and find tricks to remember them and practice. Then I read and they write, spending more time on difficult words. Not much fun but it works.

No phonics, Iwantakitchen?

I used to wrote them in large letters on index cards - one card for each word - and blu-tacked them to the wall opposite dd's place at the table so every time she looked up she would see her spellings.

I would aske her to spell them to me at breakfast. She would read the letters off the index cards. That way she never got them wrong, and saw the words spelt correctly at every meal.

She never got a spelling wrong. It helped that she was a bookworm too, of course. IMO, there is no substitute for reading a lot to get a feel for spellings.

Some phonics but they are in year 4 and 5 and they review the phonics rules for their spellings at school. here we practice the words more or less 'by heart' . We might revise a 'rule' if they struggle. So this week for my year 5 it's unstressed vowel e, so words to learn are deafening, definitely, disinterested, frightening, generally, geography, and a few more. They are difficult words so I think that ds needs to learn them by repetition, as well as understanding the rules.

Hmm. I wouldn't have said they were particularly difficult words and I can't see the unstressed 'e' in many of them. They seem to me more to require knowledge of suffixes. Phonically the examples you've given are really quite regular.

Anyway, good luck with them.

Of course Maizie. How lovely of you to remind me that I have a dumb 9 year old who finds these words difficult. Thanks, charming.

Maizie is right - just practising a word like disinterested over and over again is nowhere near as effective as spelling the root word first, which can easily be sounded out, then making word families just by adding prefixes and suffixes, e.g. disinterest, uninterested, uninteresting, uninteresting, disinterested - your y5 child can then spell both words within that family and use ing, ed, un and dis to spell countless other words instead!

Think you were a bit over-sensitive there - the point was clearly that the words were fairly regular, not that your child was 'dumb'

All the words in iwant's list have an unstressed vowel though, don't they?

I can see lots of unstressed e's in those words - it depends how you pronounce them. For instance, if you say gee-ography it's much easier. If you say jography it's harder. (Before anyone bothers, most cut-glass accents will use jography. Neither pronunciation is more correct than the other.)

I can see an unstressed vowel in all except definitely.

You mean "use a spelling voice" to make the spelling more obvious that's what we do in Y6 phonics lessons.

2nd 'i', Feenie?

I doubt Maizie was calling your DS dumb. It's just that traditionally we've taught/learnt spellings letter by letter and look/copy/write/check so longer words look 'more difficult'

If we moved towards teaching children how to learn spellings more effectively, those words become a lot easier.

is an alternative spelling for the sound /j/ not an unstressed /e/

Struggling with that one, Rafa - I would definitely say definITely .