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

More of a schwa than 'IT' in my accent.

Unless I'm using a spelling voice, in which case it would be more like finite.

I'm with rafa on definitely but I'm coming at these with a phonetics/phonology background, not phonics about which I admit to knowing very little.
Does phonics consider what we would term a silent E an unstressed E then?

In phonics we teach about the schwa sound we don't teach silent 'e' ( all letters are silent - people make the sounds)

It is worth noting that most words for spelling only have one tricky bit in them - it is really worth looking at those bits very closely indeed- like going over a difficult bit in a piece of music lots of times.
My feeling is that a child can remember their 20 words for the week for the spelling test, but it takes much longer for them to be used correctly in their writing work.

Which is why spelling lists aren't really good practice.

I completely agree that they are pretty much an utter waste of time Feenie, but schools will insist on doing them every week and it causes so much stress.

We don't send home spellings to learn and find parents demand them

How depressing Mrz .- maybe it is because it sounds such a worthy and useful thing to be doing.

Only HW I ever got back.

Obviously the parents saw it as useful unlike the rest of the stuff I sent home

I do apologise, Iwantakitchen. Of course I wasn't insinuating that your child was dumb. I was just surprised that you weren't using (or didn't appear to be using) a phonics route for helping your DS learn those words as the ones you gave as examples were mostly quite straightforward.

Break them into syllables and they instantly become less frightening; spell them one syllable at a time then add the suffixes. Don't try to remember letter strings (remembering letter strings is very hard for lots of children). Use the 'spelling voice' for remembering words which have bits in which are ambiguous. Like saying 'gee og ra fy' to remember that the first chunk need an 'e' after the 'g', or 'de fin ite ly' for definitely. Do you think he could spell all the little chunks/syllables without much problem?

Ok phonics me this then (this week's words, year 5):
Marvellous (why two ll. And it could easily sound like marvallous, or marvalous)
Prosperous (to me it sounds like prosparous)
Venomous (to me it sounds like venemous)
Familiar (why are there not two ll)
Generous (the way most people pronounce it around here it sounds like genarous)
Feasible (do I need to say? It does sound a bit like feasable, or feaseble depending on your accent)
Medicine (is it just me or could it be medacine, or medecine)
Business (now that's a good one, English is my third language and this one took me about 10 years to remember. Obviously I don't work in business.)

In my book, phonics only go so far. Sorry. I know you believe you are right, the likes of Mrz and Maizie, but I think there's a point when it's just a question of learning by heart. As a parent I don't know all the spelling rules. As a foreigner, I learned to spell English by sight. I remember the first time I had to spell the word Wednesday. Confused I was.

The problem is there are over a million words in the Oxford English Dictionary (and counting) so learning every word just isn't an option.
You need an effective strategy (because spelling reform isn't likely to happen in this lifetime) using a spelling voice to say the word precisely as its spelt, breaking words into syllables and looking at the parts you find tricky - such as the double in marvellous.

How can I help my son(he is in Y3) with his spelling words,like:magnificently, monotonously,thoroughly...? He is very good at spellings but really struggling with this ones

Business (now that's a good one, English is my third language and this one took me about 10 years to remember. Obviously I don't work in business.)

busy + ness - the two morphemes in the word

Apply spelling rule/ usual pattern (though don't doubt there are exceptions) - of When a word ends with a consonant plus y, you must change the y to an i^ when you add another morpheme.

so:

happy + ness = happiness
worry + ed = worried
heavy + est = heaviest
early + er = earlier

I seem to remember that was how it was dealt with in the spelling program my DC are doing. Though I then have to sort of say to them in business you are busy to ensure they remember how to break that up into morpheme correctly as it's not as obvious as the others I listed.

I find we are tending to do that anyway - Ghosts have hosts for example, where has here in it as does the place there - so cover first letter you are here - wrist, watch are all hand related so five letters long same as five fingers so if they end up with more than that because they've added h after w they know to look again.

Hopefully as the spelling become more embedded they won't need these things it will be automatic. On plus side eldest DC is now when given a list of spelling is looking at pre/suffixes and then breaking root words into the phonics sounds and just focusing on any non standard tricky bits. It does mean it taking her less time - though it's a massive help the lists currently have a point/pattern involved and aren't random or ones almost designed to cause confusion that we've had in the past.

wrist, watch - watches go on wrist hence being hand related.

On plus side eldest DC is now when given a list of spelling is looking at pre/suffixes and then breaking root words into the phonics sounds and just focusing on any non standard tricky bits. It does mean it taking her less time - though it's a massive help the lists currently have a point/pattern involved and aren't random or ones almost designed to cause confusion that we've had in the past.

This is what I was talking about when I mentioned teaching children how to learn spellings. I'm not sure many are doing a good job of moving onto this after they have done their initial phonics teaching in R and year 1.

mummyof2
magnificently - should be able to break this into syllables and sound it out, paying attention to the 'c' spelling of the sound /s/.

monotonously - break into its constituent parts and maybe talk about the meaning. In my head I pronounce this as 'mono - tone - ous -ly'. If he can spell mono and tone, he should know that we often remove the final 'e' to a root when adding a suffix. They you just add the 'ous' and 'ly' endings.

thoroughly - look at thorough first and break it into sounds. Draw attention to the 'o' spelling of /u/ and the 'ough' spelling of the shwa sound. Once he can spell that, then add the 'ly' ending.