Communicating
The purpose of writing is to communicate thoughts and ideas and so writing words that can be read and understood is more important than getting spellings exactly right, at least as a first step.
Encourage
When your child wants to write a word they do not know how to spell, encourage them to have a go. Encourage them to say the word aloud and listen to the sounds as they say it. Then they should attempt to write it out sound by sound saying the word aloud as they do so. They may want to write out two or more attempts – (e.g. bot, bote, boat, bowt) and then decide which one looks right. Children may find it useful to have a list of very common words (on a key ring, or in a small credit card holder), with unusual spellings, to refer to as they write. For homework, it would be useful to have a keyword list for the subject – ask at school for one.
Learning
When learning spellings it helps to learn families of words which contain the same final sound e.g. the ‘igh’ sound – fight, sight, high, sigh, right, rather than lists of unrelated words.
There are many ways to learn how to spell words, but for a child having problems with spelling it is important to get them to write the words down as they learn them.
The ‘Look Say Cover Write Check’ approach to learning spellings is a good method to teach your child. It uses a ‘multi-sensory’ approach, useful for dyslexic pupils:
- Look at the word
- Say it correctly aloud
- Cover it up
- Visualise the word (try to see a picture of the word)
- Write it down (while saying it aloud)
- Check to see if it’s correct
Be aware that this method does not work for everyone. Nothing does!
Checking
If your child asks you to check through their writing, always make a positive comment first – e.g ‘this is a really interesting story’. Then pick out two or three spellings for them to correct and learn using the ‘Look Say Cover Write Check’ approach described above. (Prioritise words which are used commonly, such as ‘there’, ‘what’, ‘would’). It is not at all helpful to pick out every mistake, and can be very demoralising.
Using a laptop to produce written work is hugely beneficial for those students with spelling difficulties:
- Selecting the correct alternative from a choice list helps to develop spelling knowledge.
- If reading and spelling is very difficult for your child, using the spellchecker on a laptop can be a challenge.
- Encourage the use of a text reader to listen to their piece of writing, this will allow them to listen and check if they have chosen the correct word (unless of course the word is a homophone).Explore the use of voice to text technology – ‘Dictate’, the free programme on Word on-line (Office 365), would be an ideal starting point.