Spelling

Y3-Y8 (age 8-13) The THRASS programme (Teaching Handwriting, Reading and Spelling Skills) THRASS is a structured multi-sensory literacy programme. It increases understanding of the structure of English with its focus on 44 phonemes: 20 vowel sounds and 24 consonant sounds. The THRASS picture chart is a widely-used support for helping pupils make informed speech-sound/spelling decisions.

Is Read-Cover-Write-Check a good strategy?

Pupils with special needs - Writing/spelling support software

Software for building vocabulary A dictionary crossed with an octopus!

Concrete poems - Wordle

Make art from any wordlist

Developing readers and writers

The current Appendix on Spelling in the National Curriculum for English in England does not give advice or statutory guidance on spelling for Key Stages 3 and 4.

What are the 100 most commonly misspelled words (and how can we remember to spell them correctly?)

1. Using I Before E

Use i before e, except after c, or when sounded as "a" as in "neighbour" and "weigh."

EXAMPLES: believe, chief, piece, and thief; deceive, receive, weigh, and freight

COMMON EXCEPTIONS: efficient, weird, height, neither, ancient, caffeine, foreign

2. Dropping the Final E

Drop the final e before a suffix beginning with a vowel (a, e, i, o, u) but not before a suffix beginning with a consonant.

EXAMPLES:

Y2-Y6 (age 7-11) Cued Spelling. This is a paired programme devised by Keith Topping and colleagues at the University of Dundee. It involves either parent and child or two children working together - in the latter case the roles of tutor and tutee may be fixed, or be reversed from time to time.

- Online whole-class spelling games from the BBC, with worksheets

- A US site with loads of free spelling resources

- How might you develop a weekly spelling lesson? (US teacher video)

- and here are some lesson plan templates to go with the video

Learning to 'sound out'

How do children learn to be able to spell a word that they have never written down before?

The answer is that they 'sound it out'.

But learning to 'sound it out' isn't easy- young learners especially need to be given some strategies and practice in learning to sound out words.

These are the stages in sounding out that children need to learn, as suggested by Richard Gentry:

Table of Illustrative errors, with codings

Note: This is not intended as a model for every classroom, but rather an illustration of all the categories described in the other pages of this site.

For simplicity, each example contains only one error.

Key to main categories: O = Omission; I = insertion; S = substitution; T = Transposition; GS = grapheme substitution

UK and US spelling differences