My school does not give spellings as homework .. this is supposedly in line with latest research

[Twiglett]

according to god cod that is

I am relieved and interestingly he can spell rather well in my view ... I occasionally correct but not that often

he is year 2 .. I am always stunned at all the 'spelling' threads because it has always been stressed to me that children pick up spelling naturally and spellings are not necessary

I am slightly older than Yurt1, and my experience was the same. We were expected to 'pick up' spelling.

It didn't work.

Boy, how it didn't work.

My english teacher was convinced I was dyslexic. My university tutor said he loved marking my work as I was the only person he had ever met who spelled more erratically than he did!

overmy- ah that's interesting as that's what our secondary teacher did for us. DS2's teacher has said that she's trying to get away from spelling tests for the sake of spelling tests so she tries to get the children to use the words in some way so they become assimilated I guess, rather than learned for a 10 minute test.

We're trying to teach ds1 (severely autistic) to spell out stuff now using a letterboard (he can't talk). Found a really interesting book by Marion Blank. She's done a lot of work on literacy- her book (available on Amazon) talks a lot about why spelling is so difficult in English - it also gives a method for teaching reading & writing to children who are struggling - looked really interesting. Haven't tried it as such as she has a different method for non-verbal kids and ds2 learned to read easily- but it looks worth a read for anyone whose child is struggling.

oh and in her book she gets you to try reading and writing using either whole word recognition or phonic systems- boy is it difficult!

MB- we were expected to just learn it in some creative way as well pmsl.

DD is the type of child who doesn't actually pick up spelling from reading, despite being a reasonably good reader for her age. She is a devil for sight reading, rather than sounding out (although she does have good phonic awareness, but choses not to use them if she can get away with it!), etc. so that probably doesn't help her with the spelling.

However he school do spelling tests from Y1 - DD's year. They get about 6-10 spellings a week, all with a similar sound - ch, sh, etc. Most are easy ones, a couple less straight forward. They are then tested on 4 of these a couple of days later. There is no real pressure or anything though. DD is very relaxed about it, she acually enjoys doing them and for her they work.

ds's reading skills have improved beyond recognition since they did intesive phonics with him. I have been so impressed that he knows what letter combinations sound like....I sometimes have to guess!

I can spell the big scientific words. It is the little ordinary ones that throw me. I was 13 before I knew that They was they and not Thay. I almost gave my english teacher fits, as I was quite good at the subject, but spelled like a martian!

5 spellings to learn a week, tested once a week at school.

dd has done such a good job with JP and I love watching it all start making sense to her!

I have a friend whose DS who is 4.5 gets spellings in FS2!

Plenty of the kids in our foundation year can barely write their name unaided. I really don't know what they would do, face dwith having to learn "the", "and" etc at this stage.

DS2 (same year, different school from my pal, obv) can spell "love" now tho, after writing 20+ chrissie cards

dd is in year one, btw