"Schools don't know the best way to teach spellings"

[leaderofthelittles]

This was said to me by my DC7 teacher, she said weekly spelling tests don't work, the children learn them that week for a test and then forget them. Our school don't send home spellings or do tests. Unsurprisingly my DC7 and 10 can not spell!

Does anyone know what the magic is? How can I teach spellings at home?

Why not teach spellings at home?

You can get books like Schofield and Simms which teach and practice the common patterns in terms of the phonics and the morphology patterns.

Also, have a spelling book. Look at their work from school, underlined misspelt words and get them to correct them, then write out each misspelt word five times in the spelling book and an example sentence for each word. Does their work from school come home each day (workbooks and so on)?

Once a week, do some random retrieval practice of the words done so far over the past several months by looking through your spelling book. Call it a quiz, not a test; they are not expected to remember them all. Half-forgetting things and then going back and doing them again, is how you actually learn things.

I raise my child in a non-English speaking country, and have had to do all the English at home myself. This is how we did it.

Some children will pick up spelling just through reading and some won’t. Those who don’t do need some sort of targeted teaching. Hence the recent focus on phonics. If your child is one of those who has picked it up easily, you do need to be a bit more open-minded about the fact that “they just need to read more” is not the answer for all children.

The philosophy behind phonics is that it’s near impossible to remember the spellings of every individual word in the English language, so children need to be able to recognise patterns. For example, if you can spell ‘and’, then you can spell ‘band’, ‘stand’, ‘strand’ etc, if you can recognise the ‘b’ sound/letter correlation, and the sound of the consonant blends ‘st’ and ‘str’. This way, you build up a way to spell (and read) a wider variety of words by recognising the individual components.

This recognition of patterns comes naturally to some children, some need to be explicitly taught, and some (e.g. those with dyslexia and hearing impairments), may never really be able to hear the different sounds or make the connection between the sounds and the letters used to represent them.

Research is ongoing, so yes, schools don’t know the best way to teach spelling. Methods go in and out of fashion. Education Ministers and parents with even less knowledge than schools have their say.

My advice is do everything, try everything, and if they get to the GCSE years and still can’t spell, get all the exam access arrangements you can, and in the uni years and adulthood, use the excellent assistive technology widely available.

I'm an avid reader - always have been. And I've always been a lousy speller. Of a generation that did weekly spelling tests - rarely did well in them. Can remember having to write out corrections for mis-spellings in secondary school. Neither of these worked. Educated to masters level so poor spelling ability never held me back.

It's probably not PC to say this but given most of us write the vast majority of important words on device with spell checkers, if not predictive text, I wouldn't worry about it too much.

I agree with the spell checkers but it's no use at all for homophones. You so just have to know these words I think.

I'm happy to teach spellings the traditional way at home but school have said "leave it to us".

Well, if your kids are not spelling very well, it looks like the school isn't really doing such a great job - or, to put it in a more charitable way, "it looks like the school's claim that their work and their work alone is enough to get the kids spelling well, is a bit dubious."

I'd just crack on and do it myself, and ignore what the school says. Like I said, I'm fairly battle-hardened from having to handle basically the whole of English language and literacy by myself and get my child to grade level by 12yo with almost no professional help, so I can't even imagine just leaving it to the school and hoping they know what they are doing!

Learn the times tables by heart in any way possible!!
Songs, repeatedly saying, writing out... Whatever works. Turning up to secondary with them as recall knowledge will REALLY help.

Reading Eggs. The app has methodology underpinning the lessons, so is not just learning by rote.

A looong time ago I did my dissertation on this.

One group learned the spellings by rote.
One group by activities.

The results were the same...

UNTIL I retested them.

The group that learnt by activities (we used First Steps) scored considerably higher as the ones who had learned by rote had forgotten some!

It needs to be relevant, reading helps loads but those trickier ones can be learned by handwriting, finding words within words, word games, mnemonics, etc.

Reading helps some people spell but it’s not true it’s the best way to learn if you find spelling difficult.

Multi sensory games like sky writing, sand writing make a massive difference and quick writing (how many times can you write the word in one minute type things),
cursive handwriting develops muscle memory and teaching actual spelling rules like when to double consonants etc that really helps too.

Doesn't your son play Scrabble or boggle or whatever?

If your kids are reading lots and not spelling well then they possibly have an issue with spelling generally. (Depending what they're reading, meaning it has a wide range of vocab unlike say a few comic books) Worth a check in with teacher to see if their spelling skills are typical or behind.

You can do what you like at home. 😂

We read at home and play wordle - Year 4. But for years we have done the CGP Collins type books - every single day. He likes it on the whole - it’s fun!!

At aged 9 he knows the 100 high frequency words 100/100 and on the 200 high frequency words he’s probably up to 175/200. Money is a good incentive here. He gets 1p per word but only when he gets full marks eg £1 for the 100 words

bbc bitesize is good for games and spelling - he will happily spend an hour playing spelling games.

we also have a book of spellings years 1-6 that he works through that follow the words patterns and flash cards for word recognition.

He loves coming up with ways to remember tricksy spellings eg Oh u lucky duck for WOULD etc we didn’t listen to school who said - leave it to us.

In year 2 he was 2 years behind his peers, in year 3 he was 2 months behind and in year 4 he’s expected and next year he will probably exceed. I didn’t start the home programme until he was in year 2 and lockdown kicked in.

Really interesting @PoorMrsNorris are you a teacher?

I think this is the approach school are taking, no weekly lists/tests but using games and tricks to learn words. Although the words on their list are a bit odd I think, yacht? Microwave? Are these essential words for 10 year olds? 🤣

Thanks @Nailsandthesea this is my instinct.

Tbfrank I was quite cross with that comment. One of my children is really behind to quickly catching up, "flying" since I started a daily routine of basics at home with them. The teacher is taking the credit for this progress and discouraging us from doing extra at home. Really irked me!

Although they have extras in place for them at school too. So maybe I'm self inflating my own impact on DC's learning,.

Yes we love scrabble here, DH is the chess whizz and I'm the family scrabble champion 😁🤣

DS was reading incessantly (still does) and well above his age. His spelling always very average, score of 98 (100 average) in year 7, and months of intervention (he was at a grammar) only raised it a few points. Though maybe it would have been worse if he wasn't a reader.

Scrabble. Reading a dictionary.

Reading regular books used to be a way but frankly, standards have slipped. Every book I read these days has at least five spelling errors in it. I read around 4 books a week- all genres nonfiction and fiction. Like I read a book where the character “snapped the reigns of the horse” another was “as an amature” (amateur), saw also “bellweather” when it is spelled “bellwether”, “maidan” when they meant a “midden”. It gets a bit frustrating.

The issue of spelling tests of ye olden days (when we were at school) is that the school did not teach spelling. I was given a list of words on a Monday, tested on a Friday. My mum didn’t make me practice so I never learned them.

now, schools recognise that to get better at spelling, children have to be taught spelling. This may or may not include a weekly test - as above, usually to placate parents who think they help, as research shows they don’t. It should, however, include daily practice of whatever they’re learning - this may be a particular sound or rule or it may be random hard to spell word. Yes, some like yacht and government are random - the government decided a list of 100 words all children should learn which are mostly not words children of that age would use. Yay for Michael gove!!

You see I am a teacher - but mainly KS5 and not English or Maths. And I’m certainly not a primary school teacher and the awesome job they do. But they do 4 hours of educating a day and very little 1-2-1. I don’t see it as the schools sole job to educate my child. They are in school under 60% of the year - roughly Monday to Friday 9 months of the year and only 9-3 so 6 hours a day.

Learning is part of life. He is doing the Romans at school (he’s not!) for example, we look at Rome and where it is. We go to the Roman Baths we look at the taste and chemicals in the water. We learn some basic Latin words, we learn the Roman numerals. We learn about the animals they have and how they kept them. We learn about the myths of the Roman gods. We learn about mythology and the rights (or lack of rights of women), we make Roman coins and look at slavery and the morals of it. We watch Mary Beard we look at the distances involved and work out how long a Roman legion would take to walk 100 miles and how long a chariot might take. We get some clay and make a Roman inscription. We learn about the emperors. We might go to a local area where there is an old rabbit warren where the Romans bred them Etc

It isn’t pushing it’s called interest. Often we do a mini project on something they aren’t studying eg in Incas or frozen planet or whatever. We garden, we have horses and dogs and I’m a single parent working in a really stressful job.

A friend once said ‘we don’t have time’ and I said we all have the same time - I had a 3 hour commute at the time. Audio books, looking at maps etc I said we just do. Admittedly we don’t play computer games or watch much tv( except bitesize, rock stars and nessy!) but he’s doing it.

anyway I digress - find what they are interested in - for mine he’s interested in animals - he reads the week junior, but then loves animals facts books and has I spy books on dogs, garden, birds, nature etc so do spellings around that etc

By the way I’m far from a perfect parent and my kids argue like cat and dog and we have our refusal moments. And some stuff he does not want to do eg handwriting and spellings used to be his nemesis so now it’s a quick do this page first thing in the morning and then you can play wordle. Spellings literally 10 minutes how many can you get - can you beat x/10 and if you can hot chocolate etc short fire is far better than 20 minutes. I found the English spelling books pretty crap to be honest and every schools approach is different but I found the international U.K. schools do teach it and be brought their book - if you want links pm me.

I guess it does not work for all kids. For mine I can only assume, as we don't really study for the spelling test. The dc are supposed to write them daily and mine do not do this. Dd never looks at the list at all. My ds, who is year 4 will literally scan the list once and be fine (on occasion I tested him after). Perhaps they also have good sight memory?

What books are they? Under 'big' publishers?

Yes, all big reputable publishers, both fiction and nonfiction books.

As a teacher I would just say read read read. Also, look at the spellings on tricky words! Sometimes just noticing they don't follow a pattern helps. I always remember thinking about the word business when I was a kid and how it does not relate to
Buses. Helped me spell it though as I always pictured a bus.

So right. Speech and language in my reception class is the worst it has ever been.