Making spelling fun! Ravenstone

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1 Ways for you and your children to enjoy spelling together and so help improve your children s spelling skills. The English language is spoken by people all over the world but it s not an easy language to spell correctly. There are far too many exceptions to the rules. But there is one rule that has no exceptions children learn far more quickly and easily if they are enjoying themselves. So the most important thing to bear in mind when helping your child with their spelling is to have fun together. At, children start learning the THRASS 500 words which are the high frequency words that they will meet and need when reading and writing. When the children can spell these 500 words they will then go on to another scheme where the spellings are based on particular patterns. What you can do as parents You have a real part to play in supporting the work being done in teaching spelling. Teachers can introduce children to new words and show them how to remember how these words are spelled, but there s only so much time they can spend on this. You can make a difference to your child s spelling by taking the trouble at home to reinforce the work being done in the classroom. The most important thing to do Encourage your child to you their THRASS chart. Encourage your child to attempt to spell new words and praise their efforts. Don t just point out their mistakes, first tell your child what he or she got right in their attempt, before helping them to make corrections. They will probably have used the right phoneme (sound) but chosen the wrong grapheme (spelling choice), celebrate what they have right and then help them find the right grapheme. And never just spell words for them! Encourage your child to try spelling the word in parts, by breaking it up into phonemes and sounding it out. Look for compound words, (eg. flowerpot, newspaper), prefixes (eg. antisocial, unhappy) and root words (bene beneficial). At we use the following method and this is the method we want children to follow at home too. Say, Name, Cover, Write, Check. 1. Look carefully at each word 2. Say the word out loud 3. Name all the letters out aloud 4. Cover the word 5. Write the word 6. Check your spelling Tips for helping younger children with their weekly spellings

2 Give your child some coloured crayons and paper. Tell them that you want to turn their spelling words into beautiful rainbow words. Let them write their spelling words with a crayon. When they have done this, go over each word again using a crayon in another colour. Now go over each word once more with another colour. (Do not use black or brown crayons.) By the time they have made a rainbow word with the different colours, the repetition will have helped them learn how to spell it. A variation of this activity is to write the words with coloured chalk on black paper. Write each spelling word on two index cards and play a matching game together. Let your child use their finger to write the words on your back and then try to guess what word they have written. Now reverse the process. Take turns to write the words in the air and see if you can read what each other has written. Have fun together by finding unusual places and ways to write the words. For example, try writing the words in sand, whipped cream, shaving foam, in bubbly bath water or on the condensation on a bathroom mirror. Play the plasticine writing challenge. Flatten a piece of plasticine and use a pencil to write a spelling word in it. Now look at the word together. After a while, smooth over the plasticine and challenge your child to write the word from memory. Encourage your child to draw pictures of their spelling words and to write the word underneath it. Give your child a newspaper, magazine or comic and see if they can find their spelling words. Cut a picture from a newspaper or a magazine and encourage your child to use their spelling words to write a sentence or story about the picture. Make your own flashcards to study and review the spelling words with your child. Spelling strategies for older children A race against time Take the role of quizmaster and set your child a time limit for the completion of each of the following activities and award points for each correct answer. Write each word five times. Write the words in alphabetical order. Write the plural of each word.

3 Write the opposite of each word. Write a sentence using each word. See if your child can write a sentence with two or more spelling words. Award a point for each word he or she uses. Games Scramble When your child has learned their spelling words and is confident they know them, write them down in a scrambled fashion and set your child the challenge of unscrambling them again, eg. denlysud = suddenly. Crossword puzzles Work together with your child to create a crossword puzzle using the spelling words. Word search Make a word search using the spelling words and ask your child to do the same. When you have both finished making your word search, swap them over and see if you can find the hidden words. Scrabble Let your child use Scrabble tiles to spell the words. Then ask them to add up the score for each word. Which word is worth the most points? The least? When you have done this, why not play a proper game of Scrabble? It s an excellent game to play as it really makes you focus on words and how to spell them. Shannon s game This game is rather like Hangman except that the letters have to be guessed in sequence, eg. B Br _ Bre Brea _ Break Breakf _ Breakfa Breakfas _ Breakfast Start by writing the first letter of a word. Then put down dashes to represent the other letters. Let your child have five guesses (or ten if they

4 are not confident) for the next letter. If he or she doesn t guess correctly, put the letter in for them and go on to the next. Continue until the whole word is completed. As an extra prompt for guessing letters, it may help your child to have the alphabet written out in front of them. As your child gradually grows in confidence, you can begin to cut down the number of guesses they are allowed. Word hunt Give your child a dictionary. Then read out the words they have to learn to spell. Now see how quickly they can find these words in the dictionary. Challenges Another good way of engaging your child s interest is to set them a challenge of some kind, which involves them working with letters. Take a letter For a real challenge, have your child use the letters of the spelling words to make sentences. For example, the word young could become yellow otters understand nuclear gadgets. A skeleton story Explain to your child that the spelling words are going to form the skeleton or framework on which they will construct a story. For example, if they had the following ten words: traveller, storm, castle, dwarf, candle, stairs, bed, shadow, scream, breakfast they could use them to make up a story like this. The weary traveller was caught in a terrible storm. Then, in a bright flash of lightning he saw a gloomy castle. He ran to it and knocked on the door. The door creaked open but there was no one there. Then the man looked down and saw a dwarf holding a candle. The creature told the man to follow him and led the way up some rickety stairs. They walked into a small room containing a four-poster bed. Cobwebs covered the pillow but the man was so tired he soon fell into a fitful sleep. Then something woke him. He opened his eyes and saw a huge shadow on the wall. He gave a terrified scream but then saw it was made by the dwarf who said, Sorry to disturb you but I forgot to ask what you want for your breakfast. How to remember spellings It is true that we remember what we want to remember. It is also right that practice is vital for memory and that the easiest things to remember are those we have found out for ourselves. So you need to remember these points when helping your children to remember their spellings. However, it s a fact of life that we tend to remember best the things we have just learned. So don t be surprised or cross if your child forgets how to

5 spell most of the words you worked so hard on together the week before. Just build in some time to look at these words again. Using mnemonics An effective way of remembering how to spell words is to use mnemonics. A mnemonic is really a trick that jogs the memory. When your child has a spelling to learn that he or she can t seem to grasp then making up a mnemonic together may be the answer. For instance, if they were struggling with the word weight, which does not match the i before e except after c rule, then the mnemonic What s the weight of eight people? might help them. Another mnemonic could take each letter of the word weight and make a simple sentence with them Which elephant is going home tonight? Making up mnemonics with your child is fun and allows them to find enjoyable, creative solutions to remembering hard spellings. Here are some other examples of mnemonics you could use with your child. Piece I would like a piece of pie. Believe Never believe a lie. Separate has a rat in it. Build U and I build a house. Because Big elephants can t always understand small elephants. Miserable A miser is always miserable. Bicycle Don t ride your bicycle in icy weather. Hear has an ear in it. Key things to remember when helping your child with spellings 1 Practice makes perfect. Practice only makes perfect if you re practising it right. Each time your child spells a word wrongly, they re practising the wrong spelling. 2 Don t try to learn all the words on a spelling list at once. Even if your child wants to learn them all in one sitting, encourage them to practise a few at a time. Find out what works best for them it may be one or two words or as many as three or four. Each time they learn another word, go back and practise the ones they ve learned before it, because practice makes perfect. 3 Review the words they know. If your child already knows some of the words on the list, have them practise them once or twice each before you start tackling the ones they don t know yet it will help boost their confidence.

6 4 Encourage your child to use the words they ve practised. That s the reason for learning them in the first place. Words learned on their own are soon forgotten. So encourage him or her to keep a notebook containing all the words they ve learned to spell. This will be their personal dictionary and they will be more likely to use it than a conventional one. Let your child write sentences and stories using these words. They can look the words up in their notebook to make sure they re still spelling them correctly. Besides, using them is practising them and, as we all know, practice makes perfect. If you have any questions or concerns please see your child s teacher or Catherine Dowler.