Spelling

The full list of references

Y1-Y3 (age 6-8) The Complete Spelling Programme (Read Write Company Ltd) Spellings are planned for each school year and structured into daily word groups. Children learn how to process both regular and high-frequency irregular words. The programme has three levels, allowing all ability groups to learn together.

Video clips, lesson plans and worksheets from the BBC

Early years foundation stage

If you are a foundation stage or KS1 teacher, you already know some of the most important facts about learning to read, write and spell:

An inescapable and notorious feature of the English spelling system is that almost all phonemes have more than one spelling (nearly 300 graphemes are used to represent the roughly 44 phonemes - see again Burton, 2011 for handy lists of the main correspondences and some of the rarer ones that nevertheless occur in common words), and so in many cases it is not possible to lay down rules for which grapheme is the correct spelling of a phoneme in a particular word.

Fourteen subordinate categories

Broadly speaking, having a background in another language can have some disadvantages, but many advantages, especially if a child has begun to acquire literacy in another language.

This is a massively researched area, so we shall only make a few key points here:

These MESH spelling materials have been devised with two goals in mind: first, to help teachers (and those training to become teachers) gain a deeper insight into how children learn to spell; and second, to provide some practical assistance in supporting that learning.

The only schemes reviewed (see below) are ones that are readily available and that have been quantitatively evaluated in the UK and shown in at least one study to double pupils' normal rate of progress. For tests which provide reading or spelling ages this means a ratio gain of at least 2.0, that is, average monthly progress of at least two months of reading/spelling age per month between pre- and post-test. For tests which provide standardised scores this means an effect size of at least 0.5. For more detail see Greg Brooks's book via the weblink.

The TES online community has over 2.6 million users, and over 4,800 classroom resources classified under 'spelling', some of which have been downloaded 50,000 times.

Follow this link to look at ten of the most highly rated TES spelling resources.

Age 5-11 spelling curriculum

Here's an Anglicised version of a simple and straightforward curriculum for spelling, derived from the US equivalent of the National Curriculum, that of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010:

Age 4-5

• Spell simple words phonetically, drawing upon a knowledge of sound-letter relationships

Age 6-7