help with spelling - yr 3

[racingheart]

Hi

Can anyone suggest any brilliant courses, sites or books for helping a yr 3 about to go into yr 4 with his spelling. he's really able in all other ways, one of the top readers in his class, good at maths, has neat handwriting, but his spelling is really appalling (got 1 out of 20 in a test recently, spells goes gose etc.)

He'd love a fun, offbeat teaching method, as he is quite quirky and has a brilliant sense of fun and silliness, but is also quite a boffin, spellings aside.

From Sound Foundations, Apples and Pears programme.
www.prometheantrust.org/

this might be good?

Phonics International can be used as a spelling programme. You can review the nature of it by looking at the free unit 1 resources (and the free alphabetic code charts will help with any synthetic phonics programme, and any teaching and learning of spelling) - and there is a 30 minute video clip (yellow box on the homepage) which describes the programme and materials.

People who use it select those resources which are helpful to their students' needs. For example, your son would be helped by the alphabetic code charts which explain the relationship between sounds and spelling alternatives, he could also track his learning with a version of these, and he would be helped by the core Sounds Book Activity Sheets looking at the cumulative word banks from a spelling perspective - and the cumulative sentence and text level work which focuses on spelling alternatives and can be used for grapheme searches (in his case), dictations and recalling spelling word banks. For a review, see www.phonicsinternational.com .

Thanks for these suggestions.

RacingHeart - if you'd like suggestions of tutors (hopefully in your area - or not too far distant) contact me:
[email protected]
and I'll find out if there are any linguistic/synthetic phonics instructors near you. These are the people who really have a handle on how to teach spelling one-to-one. If you're interested have a look at www.soundreadingsystem.co.uk (no commercial connection!)
there's another programmer using a similar structure who may be able to suggest someone.

~Do you know what approach the school took?

Best of luck, anyway.