Y1 teachers! How am I supposed to teach spellings?

[becarefulplease]

DS has eight spellings to learn and we aren’t doing very well - any tips or reassurance gratefully received! He’s very enthusiastic but isn’t retaining the knowledge very well at all.

Thank you! Just want to support him where I can he’s very enthusiastic which is great but I’m not always sure how much goes in!

Early years teacher here (although in Scotland so we follow a different curriculum).
I’d find out what reading programme they use in his school and ask for advice from his teacher. They’ll also be able to give advice on which sounds specifically he needs extra support with. Honestly, they’ll be grateful you’re putting work into this at home! If you were one of my parents, I’d kiss you if you came asking for help on how to support your child at home with reading! 😂
Not advisable to differ too much from the reading programme especially if he’s struggling to retain the sounds. Jolly Phonics is very different to Read Write Inc, which is very different from Nessy Spelling etc. A different way of practicing at home may confuse him.

Do you do school reading with him every day? That is key, as they are recognising and practicing the sounds. ask the teacher for help doing it if needed eg how to sound out words.

Take a look at some you tube videos on phonics if you are unsure of the phonemes (sounds) yourself, especially the digraphs. I am sure if you asked the teacher they can point you to some resources as actually quite ridiculously schools all have slightly different methods they follow. Ours uses “unlocking letters and sounds”.
Practicing these and breaking down words when reading will then help with the spellings.

also try doing some “spelling bee” games where you put some letters in hexagons and one in the middle and get him to make words. The NYT has a free game. There are others around eg Telegraph has panagram or other apps. Or get chat gpt to help design some based on what sounds he is learning or struggling with. Draw them out on cards and rearrange to make words. Reward based maybe too…eg if he gets 5 words/stars then he gets X (whatever motivates!)

They really don’t differ, except in order of teaching sounds (slightly!) or group/whole class teaching at school. A phonics programme is a phonics programme, the principles are the same - say the sounds, then spell the word from left to right using each sound. Blend back to check the word is right (encoding and decoding are reversible processes and are taught alongside each other).

As an aside, the misspelling of the word ‘practising’ is especially irksome on spelling threads….😆

Thank you. He does Little Wandle.

I read with DS every day and he is able to blend the sounds well (he’s on phase 3 set 2) but in all honesty he’s a bit lazy sometimes and will guess the word a LOT. He also has a good memory (which you’d think would help with spellings!) so he often ‘memorises’ the book and means I’m sometimes a bit unsure how much he’s reading and how much he’s just parroting IYSWIM.

Spelling the sounds with him will be excellent practice for him then 😊

Hang in there. It may be his little brain is busy in other areas right now. But one day, a connection will be made in the right part of his brain and for a few weeks, he will come along in leaps and bounds. A growth spurt in the brain can take them a long way in as short time. Then he will plateau again and you will end up fretting again. It’s all cyclical at this age, I found.

Keep reading and singing to him, keep practicing and praising.

Something more multisensory? Scatter sand or flour on a tray and write in that with a finger. Make the words with dough? Sing the sounds?

Primary teacher and phonics lead here. He's doing a phase 3 recap by the looks of things. Phase 3 is covered in reception so the teacher is just recapping sounds they should already know. The other words probably have ai, oa, short oo (book/cook) sounds. So they don't all follow one rule but it is digraphs he should have already covered.

DD did the same thing with guessing. What helped was getting some other books from the library, usually a little bit harder than her school books but still only phonemes that she'd covered in school already. We'd read those once or twice a week, or more if she was particularly enthusiastic that week. Something about having to concentrate more on the unseen, harder books made her concentrate more on the easier, well known books too. Or, that's what I tell myself!

We did little wandle with Dd last year in year 1 and she had a weekly spelling test based on the digraphs they we were working on, along with 2 or 3 “tricky” words. And we’ve always used the look, cover, write, check method, along with getting her to use it in a sentence to help it “stick”

Those words seem quite tricky for this point in Year 1. I wouldn't recommend him simply memorising the words through repetition; focus on checking if he knows the sounds needed to spell them confidently instead.

e.g. Does he know 'ee' needed for feel and 'ow' needed for down?

If he's confident in individual sounds, the spelling part will click eventually. If he isn't, memorising these words won't help in the long run when he can spell 'down' but not 'clown' etc.

I got DS to pick out the letters from a huge pile of magnetic letters and spell the word letter by letter before transferring it to the radiator. It made him actually pay attention to the letters which he‘d only been glancing at.

OK - the five words that you have given are all words with 3 sounds

F ee l D ow n S or t F oo d R - igh t

All of these sounds will have been taught in Reception - they are the 1st way of writing these sounds (probably) and in Y1 they will learn other spelling of these sounds.

Can he read the words? I.e say d ow n and then down. If you say ‘down’ can he sound it out by saying d-ow-n using sounds not letter names.

If he can do the above, but not write them, then he doesn’t know what the sounds look like to write them down - using magnetic letters will help.

To be honest if he can’t sound them out or know how to write the particular sounds, then he needs something different from the teacher.

Aah - people posted whilst I was writing!!

Did they? 🤔🤔