Spellings for reception child?

[ChristmasTreeCat]

My dd, who is a late July birthday, has asked Santa for some spellings homework like the yr 1s in her class get. She is very good at Reading (reading usborne beginners reference books about anything and everything, famous five, reads bedtime stories to her who brother etc). School have refused to give her any as 'they don't give spellings to yr R'. Can anyone point me in the direction of some good resources so I can start doing some sensible lists of words with her? It seems a shame not to go with her when she is actively seeking out knowledge! Thank you

One of the best thing we bought for my ds at that age was electronic dictionary.
It's easy for child to look up new words, check spelling, and has built in word games like hangman, wordbuilder( a game like Keeptrudging suggested)

If she likes writing own stories, story cubes are great. Or you can make your own story wheel.

OP - if your daughter is desperate to write stories and letters to people, I'd let her do just that. As an able reader, she can likely spell a lot of words correctly already, and work many more out. My 5 year old is a good reader and spells well without having been taught lists of spellings. He will often use a phonically plausible spelling - "cum" for example, but we use that as a talking point to remind him of the different ways to make those sounds.

I think there is much more to be gained by writing stories - which she wants to do -than just learning word lists (but I'm not a teacher).

Good point mrz - have to say though that I didn't know 'ai' in said was phonic sound 'e'. So I wouldn't have been able to tell her! Presumably I could find a full list on oxford owl site somewhere.

I wish my DS1 had been as keen, he loved puzzle books and anything to do with number but he never wanted to do anything to do with writing.
Personally I'd use magnetic letters on the fridge, foam letters in the bath, writing in shaving foam, making words with play doh and just writing with nice pens/felts. I'd look at any writing she has done and pick a few words she can't spell from there. I'd also pick a few useful words like there, the, said, come, some, they. I think it's lovely that she wants to do it.

I'm guessing that some people find doing spellings 'sad', because they didn't enjoy it themselves, but if ur DD wants to do them, it's not at all sad. Everyone needs to learn to spell, and some find it fairly easy and enjoy it, others less so. That doesn't make it sad or wrong to enjoy learning to spell new words!
Learning to spell just by reading can be hit or miss, that's why schools do 'spellings'.

"- have to say though that I didn't know 'ai' in said was phonic sound 'e'" so if I asked you what the sounds in said are you wouldn't be able to tell me /s/ /e/ /d/ and work out which letters represent each sound? Bet you could

The evidence is that sending lists of spellings home for tests (all that look cover write check) doesn't teach children to spell and is a waste of time. Children who score 10/10 week after week rarely spell the same words correctly in independent writing.

Does DD really want some spellings? Or does she just want to do the same academic work as kids who are likely her equals in this area that she can see in the class? Despite the fact her goals, and the things she needs to learn for the year are different. There's lots of kids in DD's class in year 1 who are behind where she was at this point in YR, but the English portions of EYFS are very minor.

I can imagine the frustration of both the kids and the teachers in a mixed YR / EYFS class.

"Children who score 10/10 week after week rarely spell the same words correctly in independent writing."

Actually my ds gets 10/10 every week, without practising words list, , and always spell the same words correctly in independent writing, thanks to early interest in spelling words correctly.

I think I have a reader like yours in reception OP. Feels like some responses on here are responding to the "reception" part rather than the "fluent reader" part.

School have set DD spelling keywords consistently correctly as a target. They sent home a list which was the words from the KS1 keywords lists that she didn't already spell right. I think that or "most common words" lists would be a good place to start. We don't do weekly lists or anything, but I don't think you're proposing that. All we do really is occasionally see if she can spell one of the words on her list, and talk her through it if she can't yet.

While I totally agree that weekly spelling tests are a pointless waste of space, I do think some separating out of spelling from writing in general can be useful. If DD is writing a story I'd probably not interrupt to tell her how to spell "beautiful", but it's a word she likes using, so if she learns it then she'll be getting more practice writing it right and less repetition of writing it wrong. That seems like a good idea to me.

I would suggest
a) focus on the phonics when learning the spellings as some posters (mrz?) have mentioned
b) not drop a word when she's got it correct - I think one of the problems with weekly tests is they learn them then immediately forget them, it never gets into long term memory.

The playing with words, reading upside down or backwards bits are familiar too. I don't see any reason to discourage it tbh*, it's just playing. DD's tricks include deciding to decode all the words in a book backwards, or decode pretending she doesn't know any digraphs. It doesn't do any harm. She's not going to suddenly forget how to read, she's reading several books a day.
*well, okay, maybe a little, some of them can get irritating.

Mrz, thats interesting, could u provide some references for the research?

catkind thank you for your response, it sounds like you understand where I'm coming from. I'm not proposing to hot house her to sit a levels in July or anything! Just asking advice on how to encourage her love of learning. She does write and I encourage 'how do you think it's spelt' and ' sounding it out'. She enjoys this, but likes things to be perfect! I've been showing her about sounding words out using phonics and have been playing nonsense words with her to get her to sound out rather than just read the word.

I'll keep going and introduce spelling some high frequency words and focus on phonics. Thank you for taking the time to respond.

Mrz I guess I always worry about not getting it 'right' and messing up the phonics teaching

Catkind it's not about forgetting how to read it's about encouraging "good" helpful habits and discouraging those that might be unhelpful.

""Children who score 10/10 week after week rarely spell the same words correctly in independent writing."
^*
Actually my ds gets 10/10 every week, without practising words list,"*^ and that's the key difference Irvine he's learnt/been taught how to spell them not crammed with word lists for a test.

mrz, DD has been playing around with phonics for 3 years, she's not got into unhelpful habits yet, I think I'm prepared to trust her on this one

Catkind, I don't think mrz thinks that your dd gets into bad habits.
Child like your dd, OP's dd, or my ds may have no problem whatever they do, but other posters' dcs may, if they thought they are ok and let them carry on doing it.
So whatever mrz says, it's not an individual but a general suggestion, and I believe it's always right.

Well as general advice to a general reception reader I quite agree. I thought we were talking about a very able reader on this thread.

Being an outstanding reader doesn't change the advice

It's difficult though mrz. My dd is on orange books but afaik has only been taught the phonics everyone else in her class has. She is memorising words by herself and now only encounters one word per book say that she can't read. I am worried about this, but as a parent don't know which phonics should be taught next and don't want to confuse her.

The aim is that she reads the words automatically which she obviously is. It's very different from sending home lists to learn as wholes.

I posted this quote on the phonics thread but it explains
"As adults we have forgotten how we were as children. We have forgotten how difficult it was to learn to read and we think we can just lay our eyes on a word and it immediately pops to mind. Indeed, there is this notion of parallel reading, we read all of the letters at the same time. This gives us an illusion of whole-word reading, but in fact, if we look at the brain, the brain still processes every single letter and does not look at the whole shape. So whole word reading is a myth"

I can imagine that and interestingly I think I can see that in action. E.g. the word in the book is scampered she attempts it as scraped. I say have another look. She will say s, c and then do the rest quickly in her head and then says something like scamp er ed. I then say that was a very good try and read the whole sentence back to her so he hears it's scampered, then she reads the sentence again. Does that sound ok?

That sounds fine. I would keep an eye on the reading it incorrectly the first time and having to be told to go back and look at it again though. Especially if she's also doing some independent reading that you aren't listening to.

Ideally you want to get her to the point where she's reading accurately the first time she encounters a new word without you having to correct.

Should she be sounding out scary unfamiliar word? I think at the moment she just guesses them if they are long and she has no idea how to sound out eg beautiful