Winnie-the-Pooh is not alone! It sums up how many children feel about spelling. How can this be made easier?
Teaching spelling is one of the most hotly debated topics in education.
Weekly test or not?
Correcting every spelling in writing or just a few?
Phonics or not?
All learners are unique, the way they learn may differ in each subject or activity; the way they remember what they have learnt and the way they retrieve knowledge from their long-term memory all show this uniqueness. So, why should there be just one method to teach knowledge and skills?
This is true for any subject, but most particularly for spelling. You will all have seen this in your classrooms:
- The child who never learns spellings but just can spell accurately
- The child who learns spellings for a test but a week later has no recall of those words
- The child who grafts all week and struggles to recall the correct spelling
- The child who is willing to try various spellings before choosing one to use
- The child who spells every word using phonics
- The child who spends ages looking in a dictionary for a word and being distracted
The child who learns spellings for a test and can reproduce those spellings in independent writing is a rarity, but this is what the curriculum demands that teachers produce.
So, how do teachers achieve this holy grail?
The short answer, with a bulging curriculum and a time-poor environment, is with great difficulty. Consequently, we end up with various one size fits all approaches and a raging debate about which is best.
With this in mind we developed a range of flexible resources, which meet the National Curriculum objectives for each year group, for teachers to adapt to suit the needs of their class. To help along the way we have a Spelling Programme which you can download FREE here:
The Spelling Programme is fully resourced with PowerPoints which look at the spelling patterns and rules, the exceptions to those rules and a range of activities suitable for whole class, small group, paired or independent work. There are no soul-destroying worksheets, just realistic and relevant activities to give children a chance to see and use the words in action.
There are spelling lists which can be used in a range of ways or not used at all – the choice remains with the class teacher. To support the learning there are Starter activities and Quizzes which can be used to start or end a lesson or as a revision aid; again, the choice remains with the class teacher. FREE samples can be found here:
Some children need multiple ways to learn spelling skills and gain the necessary knowledge. To this end there is a bank of multi-sensory spelling activities based on those that I used with great success with children who had ‘wobbly spelling’. The activities are generic and require few resources. but used daily can achieve significant improvements in a child’s ability to spell accurately in their independent writing.
Our Morning Work provides further opportunities to use spelling skills, either with short writing tasks or with the focus on vocabulary – its use and meaning.
This summer we will be adding our assessment resources to align with The Spelling Programme. There will be a Start of Year assessment and termly progress tests. Each pack contains a Teacher Guide which provides:
- Domains covered by the test
- Administration of the test guidance
- Marking the test guidance
- Mark scheme
Also included are Pupil and Teacher versions of the tests and a spreadsheet to analyse the outcomes and identify gaps.
Although some of our resources are free, to access the full range you will need to subscribe. Our Annual Membership is £20 which gives you full site access – this is amazing value for a year’s spelling resources, let alone the thousands of other resources on the site. Join us here:
I don’t purport to have all the answers. but what I can do is provide a range of tried and tested adaptable resources which I have used, and seen used, which have shown great progress in children’s confidence in their spelling knowledge and skills.
