"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?

It would have been more helpful to teach you that the root word of ‘business’ is ‘busy’. And that when you apply suffixes to words ending in y, the y changes to an ‘i’. Applies to a vast number of words instead of just the one!

Yes, morphology and word roots are really important.

”Speak as you spell” is also helpful for multi syllable words that have the schwa sound in abundance.

There will never be a foolproof way to teach English spelling because English is a language taken from many different language roots and our spellings reflect that. As others have said the only way is by familiarity through reading.

That’s not what the research shows. English is certainly a very complex language for the reasons you describe, but you’ve literally just made up the last bit!

You can’t advertise your website here.

Those who say spelling comes from reading are right - for some, good spelling happens almost automatically, and these are the people who might well comment on whether a word "looks right".

Others might still be voracious readers but perhaps their visual processing is not a strength - for them spelling won't "just happen" but needs input and support.

I happened to have one of each type, but both read loads. One did well in spelling tests, spelled accurately in written work, resented being asked to practice them. The other was very wobbly with spelling at first, had some input from her granny (who was helping at home when she was in year 3 and 4), and learned "how" to learn spellings, which I'm sure will have involved discussion about word roots and basic etymology. Unfortunately until the end of primary, being able to get words right in a test led to the teachers saying "her spelling's fine" even when asked about it. Spelling accurately in her written work needed teachers to be actively requiring this of her ... For what it's worth, DD is now studying English at university. She remains aware that she has to watch out for spelling slipping if she is tired. Her ability to pick up fine linguistic details eg describing what makes up different accents is amazing.

"Spelling tests" may indeed be of limited value. But learning spelling patterns, practising them, and then later having spelling errors spotted for correction, is essential in some form.

Explicit teaching of the alphabetic code is essential for most children, and only helps the children who have a natural aptitude for spelling.

If you want to practice, don't do "read/cover/write", break the word down into phonic chunks e.g. temp-er-at-ure". That's all fairly easy phonic chunks they've known since Y1 except for the -ure.

DD was doing -ation words on the app she uses and had "adoration" and it turns out she knew "adore" so I checked she knew the -e needed dropping and then said "and you need ation, how do you spell -ation" and she did know that as well.

Does she know that the ‘e’ needs dropping for any suffix beginning with a vowel? That’s handy too 😊

I’d also add identify any trickier parts and teach groups of words together. Whether those are groups with the same etymology or the same sound/spelling correspondences.

DD uses Doodle Spelling (I'm a fan of all their apps, though English is probably a bit less helpful than the others) and they do related words together (e.g. she was doing -ure and now she's doing -ation). I find that her school doesn't do this and for a while was doing "words she's spelled wrong this week" which is all very well but ended up with their/there with no context at all.

Previously they were doing "very hard words the children won't know the meaning of" as far as I could see (e.g. in Y2 they had affect and effect, for goodness sake).