Year 3 spelling

[realitychick]

Hi

Just wondered if anyone had any tips or can recommend any good (interesting/fun) resources for helping a year 3 boy with spelling. He's bright, in top sets for everything including reading, except for spelling.

He is incredibly enthusiastic at school. In general I'm not worried about him but would like to help and even though my background is in English I'm a bit stumped on this. He can 'learn' spellings at home with me and get 9 out of 10 right but when he's tested this drops down to between 1-4 out of 10, and when he writes without supervision over 50% of his words are misspelled. It just doesn't seem to stick.

Thanks

Does he know all the phonemes and alternative ways of writing them?
Learning spellings (for most children) is only effective for the test and they rarely apply them afterwards. So he is unusual in that he isn't even recalling them for the test he is far from unusual in not remembering them in his independent work.

My class' favourites:

www.tutpup.com (repetative but fun games)

www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/english/spelling_grammar/ (mix)

www.bbc.co.uk/schools/wordsandpictures/phonics/ (phonics level, lower level)

www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/interactive/literacy.html#7 (variety of games)

It's really common that a bright child is able to memorise a list of 10/15 for a test then forgets. I had complaints recently from parents because as an expeirnece I started moving spelling tests around the week to see if it affected the high scores. Parents complaoned that suddenly their DC was getting 2/3 instead of 9/10. I gave up on sending lists home after that and just teach spellig rules for 10 min a day now!

It sounds as though he has a fabulous visual memory -so he's learning the words for his tests purely 'visually' rather than than all-through-the-word grapheme (a sound-spelling unit) by grapheme.

I suggest he and you use the 'Practical spelling activity for children working at Advanced Code level' on this page (scroll down)
www.aowm73.dsl.pipex.com/dyslexics/spelling.htm

Check his Alphabet Code knowledge with the following test first -this is what 'mrz' was talking about in her post above.
ontrackreading.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/codeknowledgetest.pdf

HTH.

Hi

Thanks everyone (sorry - thought I'd replied earlier - mustn't have clicked the right place.)

These are great suggestions and you all clearly know what you're talking about - off to Google phonemes and graphemes and look up those links.

Maverick - just wanted to say thank you so much for the links - the dyslexics one you recommended is brilliant and has given me loads of ideas as well as helping me to understand what he's doing better. Going to try some of these techniques with him tonight.

Strawberrykate - thanks for those links. He likes Bitesize but we've not tried the others yet so will give them a go too.