What's the point of writing the weekly spellings backwards?

[pigsinmud]

Ds2 (yr4) came home with his spellings the other day and a new exercise book. He has to copy his spellings into the book forwards and then backwards. Dh and I have been puzzling over why he has to do them backwards. Ds2 asked as well. Anyone know? Is there a reason or just a teacher's whim!?

By the way he rather enjoyed writing them backwards. His spellings are usually fairly long words - this week he had neighbourhood, dictatorship ....

Never heard of that, but perhaps it is to develop accurate copying? My DD is terrible at mispelling words even when they are written down in front of her (though she does OK at spelling tests). Maybe I should try this on her!

Brain muscle flexing - like patting your head and rubbing your stomach, doing somehting counter-intuative can help you learn when you go backand do it properly? But that's just a wild guess. Actually, I haven't a clue

I suggest that his teacher has been on a NLP-based 'magical spelling' course- complete psuedo-science, like Brain-Gym , but that has never stopped some in the teaching profession being duped by charismatic vendors of snake-oil

It's related to 'spacial awareness' - not sure why else they would do it unless checking for dyslexia/dyspraxia or something similar. Maybe it's a new fandango method of using areas of the brain .....

sounds very odd to me

I suspect Maverick's right. Until a sensible teacher comes on here and explains why this might possibly be a good idea!

I've never heard of this. Maverick's theory sounds the most plausible.

What's wrong with Brain Gym Maverick?
Not picking an arguement, just curious for your POV.

Another vote for Maverick. In fact, I would have thought this was worse than useless, since words are not a sequence of letters but a sequence of phonemes, and writing them backwards is often going to obscure this fact - think about how you would read "late" as opposed to "etal" for example - the silent e suddenly gets sounded if you write it backwards, or else it becomes a meaningless collection of letters. Odd.

the marvellous Ben Goldacre on Brain Gym

Thanks mrsgboring. I do "Brain Gym" with my class, but not parcelled up with the science bollocks. Just a good opportunity to awaken the children and stretch their legs!

Thanks for the replies. We couldn't see how it could help at all, but ds2 was quite happy to do it .... and he isn't usually with homework.

How odd. Sounds unnecessarily complicated and barmy.

You don't think they meant write the list of words backwards? Ie bottom to top so you don't just learn the spellings in a particular order on a list?

That would make more sense TsarChasm, but she'd given an example!

Ah well...some of these teachers have some odd ways all right