“English spelling,” says R.L. Trask, “is notoriously complex, irregular, and eccentric, more so than in almost any other written language” (Mind the Gaffe!, 2006). My tutoring students routinely ask me why spelling is just so hard!
In classroom teaching, I relied on teaching rote learning of the spelling ‘rules.’ For example, in one-syllable words the vowel sound is usually short (cat/dog/bed) whereas when two vowels are next to each other the first vowel is long (meat/rain/pie/load). With repetition, some children learned the rules – and some didn’t.
English is also unfortunately more complicated than a few simple rules. I’m asked “Bridget, why do ‘sun’ and ‘son’ sound the same? Why doesn’t ‘son’ sound like ‘on?’ Recently I was discussing the doubling consonants rule with a student: step -> stepping -> stepped. But when we came to ‘swim’ we were stuck, because swim -> swimming -> swam, not swimmed! Swam also changes to swum when it is preceded by a helping verb. No wonder our children get confused!
I can’t eliminate all the pain of spelling, but I would like to share a few activities that I have picked up from classroom teaching, working in tutoring centres, and my own work with Learning Creations and Holistic Tutoring that I have found to be helpful.
- Creating a spelling word in clay. Create the word one letter at a time, then put it all together. Your child can touch and say each letter in order, then close their eyes and answer questions about the word (eg what is the first letter? What is the last letter?). The next steps are jumbling up the letters and asking them to put them back in order. Then spell the word backwards and forwards from memory.
- Writing a spelling word in colour and taking a mental photo to memorise forwards and backwards.
- Memory card games in sets of 3 – the spelling word on one card, its meaning on another, and a picture to represent it on the third. Mix up the card, flip them over and play a memory game with them.
- Get writing! Writing their own story and reading it aloud is empowering for a student who thinks he is a ‘bad’ writer. Once a child is comfortable with and enjoys writing stories, the next step to add in is editing for meaning during or after writing the story. Then get them to pick one or two spelling words from the story that they would like to work on – if it’s a really interesting word that they used in their own story, they may be more motivated to learn it than a list of words given by the teacher.
- Work on visual memory skills with the game ‘I went on holiday and I took…’ adding an object each time.
- Play Boggle and build words – make it a game or a competition. If they enjoy this, you could pick out a word when you see an advertisement online or in a newspaper and make it a challenge.
- Flip cards do work well for some children, so don’t discount these just because they’re rote learning
- For an especially tricky word, write it on a whiteboard and break it down into syllables and sounds, then put it back together.
