Earlier this school year, I had a post on some ways I approach spellings with my students. Here is an overview of how I have worked on improving spellings with the children.
I started by asking the children to do a free writing sample (can be based on any topic) to ascertain their spelling strengths and weaknesses. I also assessed their knowledge of how to spell the 72 tricky words from the Jolly Phonics programme.
Following this, I made a list of their spelling strengths so that we wouldn't waste valuable time on spellings they already knew. Instead we focused on any tricky words they didn't know. Following this, we began Brendan Culligan's Corewords List, using dictation sentences.
Each week the children also choose 1 or 2 words they want to learn to spell themselves, giving them ownership of their learning. Over a 5 week period, one child learned how to spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious by segmenting it into manageable chunks!
Strategies we use throughout the week include:
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| A sample worksheet using some strategies |
- magnetic letters
- finding letter strings
- finding words within the word
- using mnemonics to remember the word
- dictation (using the spellings in context)
- making their own sentences
- writing in sand
- tracing on their palm or on another child's back
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| One of their favourites! |
These posters are used as prompts for the children and they are also encouraged to come up with their own strategies to remember words. This is an example of what one student did to remember her cousin's name, without any prompt from me! (Isla: I see lego apples!)
Other resources that I find very useful are:
Commoncoresheets.com
This offers many types of individualised worksheets for your students to practice their spellings.
This offers many types of individualised worksheets for your students to practice their spellings.