Yr 1 spellings drive me to drink........

[niceglasses]

Any nice tips from lovely patient mammies and teachers with (quite hard I think) Yr 1 spellings? We seem to be caught in a trap of row-tantrum-row-eventually do them. He is not too interested. Fairly bright, but a fidget. I feel I am not motivating here at all, but putting off. Often ends in tears which makes me awful.

I do think they are reasonably hard for a 6 yr old e.g telephone, purple, quick.

Dunno tho, can't remember what I was doing when 6.........

Ooops...reading that last post, it looks like me who needs the spelling practice

Slalom, seriously, that is not on, it's outrageous! no wonder you feel like a drink....I'd have drunk Ballantynes dry by now....what do the other parents say? If I was you and got no joy from the yr1 teacher i would take it further, it's enough to turn a child off for life that!

DS is in reception, he gets 4 new "sight" words a week, a ORT reading book, a library book and a teachers recommendation book a week. He will soon be getting a maths game home and a writing bag they take turns with. I thought that was a lot!!

Have a look at the literacy page on the ambleside primary school web site (don't know how to do links, but search for that school)
They've got a brilliant look, cover, write page you can put your own spellings on. This page had made so much difference to my ds6 and his enjoyment of spellings.
Just the same as doing it yourself, but seems to be much more fun.

My DS is in Yr 1 and an August b'day - he is on Stage 3 ORT - almost finished I think. Has just started getting spellings in the last 3 weeks - his teacher waits till they know 200 words before starting them on spellings as she wants to build their confidence.

His spellings are very basic - this weeks are:

big
dad
day
dog
do
from
down
did
will
his

As an aside - he struggles with "b" and "d" still - is this normal?

Budababe - I think it's normal. I read with ds1's year 1 class on Wednesday and 2 of the children were still mixing up 'b' and 'd'.

www.amblesideprimary.com/ambleweb/lookcover/lookcover.html

Thanks for the suggestion

Bubababe - Absolutely normal - Have you tried the 'bed' approach? Write 'bed' in clear, bubble writing, and draw someone asleep on it. It looks like a bed with a high board at each end. It can really help to set their minds about which way round the letters go. Hope that makes sense!?

Slalom - That is a rediculous amount of work. It sounds to me like there is a bit of conflict in the school if the yr 2 teacher said that to you. It might be worth having a quite word with the head - if you feel you can, I know a lot of heads aren't that approachable. Not to complain as such but just to bring it to their attention.

ridiculous always struggle with that one!! {must try harder}

We all feel the same and have mentioned it to the teacher and the head but nothing has changed. At this stage with only a few weeks to go I have given up bothering and long for the holidays but I am sure we will get piles to do then. I forgot the library book off the list. Ds1 turned 6 last week so isn't the youngest but is in the youger half of the class.
At the moment I can just about manage it but when ds2 starts reception in september I don't know how I am going to do both sets of homework. He has started jolly phonics at nursery and gets 3 letters a week sent home to do but I don't pressureise him.

wait til you get to multiplication tables...those turn your hair white

Thanks Gobbledigook and tigerschick. I figured it was pretty normal TBH.

tigerschick - what do you mean by "bubble writing"?

here is the official guidance on the amount of homework you should expect. Does yours fit this? I think not!

Sorry Bubababe - I mean fat writing like this (sorry it's so big)

Wow we are well outside the norm.

Last Sunday when writing the two stories out and doing the reading ds1 had to go for a sleep in the middle. He was so tired and bored with it I let him

We have spellings and tables in Year 1. The latter really are painful because ds's mental maths isn't quite up to some of the tricks that would help him if he was doing this later (well thats what I think anyway) I have to make an effort to ensure that the workload is spread over the week otherwise we end up with a miserable Sunday afternoon. But other than reading no other homework - thankfully!

But I was looking at ds's creative writing the other day and realising that they don't seem to make too much of an issue of spelling whilst they're doing that - I guess they're concentrating on story structure, layout and punctuation etc.

For learning spellings we do the Look-Say-Cover-Write-Check as well. I do find that we have to ensure that ds1 practises writing the words as well as he is prone to reversing some of his letters still. But I might look at some of the ideas below too - very useful.

The thing that gets me about the spelling tests is how much they retain in their long term memory. My dd is also Y1 and I thought I'd test this the other day, I asked her to do some spellings she'd done a couple of weeks back (brother, other, sister, couple of others I can't remember) and she really struggled, was trying to do them phonetically again (b-r-u-v-e-r). So I wonder how much these tests help with their spelling long term? (She'd them all right in the test that week!)

dd's list this week is
because
laugh
little
people
once

They only give 5 a week now - were giving ten but parents complained it was too much and they cut down. It's a lot more relaxed now and she does feel more confident in just learning the few words. Maybe you could ask the teacher to cut down the number of words?

Some of the words your y1s are learning are really difficult, thought my dd's were but horrible, telephone etc? wow.

We don't get any