Some spelling techniques that are working for us
And please share your own!
Not many homeschooling families actively enjoy spelling. It seems to be one area where plain old rote learning is required, and it’s hard to make it fun. For all but the most broad-minded, it’s essential. Yes, you can be an excellent writer and thinker and still be a terrible speller. But some people will judge you based on your spelling (I know, I’m one of them). Spell-check technology has been around for decades, but I still spot typos and errors all the time. It drives me crazy. For the sake of all us typo-spotters out there, our children have to learn to spell.
With my daughter (8), I was rather slow out of the starting blocks, maybe because she was a reluctant reader for a while. I can’t really remember what we did to begin with, but she didn’t make much progress, and she hated it. There were tears. But now we’re in a nice rhythm, and it’s actually become quite enjoyable. She’s making progress. I’ve started the same thing with my son (6), who is also coming along nicely. What follows isn’t rocket science, but it took me a while to work it out for myself, so maybe it will be helpful to a few other families.
Here’s what we do.
First, I realised that spelling tests don’t actually help children learn to spell. They help you to memorise, yes, but to know how to spell a word you have to see it over and over again, write it over and over, and look at it really carefully. A test will show you what a child has memorised that week, but it won’t tell you what they have internalised and deeply understood. I’ve heard from both adults and parents of school children that you can get top marks in your weekly spelling test and still not be great at spelling.
I use these lists from Oxford Owl to give me an idea of what words the children should be learning. Each day, I write a word for each child on the blackboard (or, if it’s a word that follows a particular pattern, like he, me, be, she, we, or break, steak, great, I’ll put up a group). We talk about the word, about anything that’s unexpected about it, and I ask the children to ‘take a picture with their brains’. We talk about a mental image they could use to remember a tricky spelling. I use different coloured chalks. It’s very visual.
Throughout the day, I’ll ask them to look at their word(s) on the board and remind them of anything notable about the spelling. Later, I either ask them to see if they can write it down, or if we’re out and about they just spell it out loud. If they’re not sure, they can look at the board or I’ll remind them.
Each child also has a lucky dip jar full of spellings on brightly-coloured paper. Lots of them are fairly easy, with a sprinkling of newer, more challenging words. The child can take a word out, look at it, and then write it down, or ask me to read it aloud so they can see if they know it from memory. They enjoy this more than you’d imagine—I think it helps that the jar is their own, and that they’re in charge of pulling out the words. I don’t ask them to do a set number, and they often amaze me and do the whole jar (which might be twenty or more). I don’t mind at all if they simply copy the words. It’s all good practice, and it takes the pressure off. I take out the easiest words periodically and replace them with the next batch. Unbelievably, they often ask to do their ‘spelling lucky dip’ as the first piece of work each morning.
When they ask me how to spell a word, I always ask them to have a go at spelling it themselves first. They can often manage it, but if they can’t, at the very least they can tell me what letter it begins with, and can often work out more than they thought they’d be able to.
Doing these things almost every day is making a big difference. We get better at difficult things the more we do them, and breaking them down into tiny bits makes them much more manageable. When the children take a break over the summer I hope to keep up the spelling work, just for a few minutes a day.
But although these tactics are working, I also think that both children have reached some sort of developmental level where they are more receptive to noticing spellings without any obvious effort. Some of the new words I’ve given my daughter recently she has known how to spell already, just from seeing them in books, on food packets, and generally out in the world. Forcing her to do more spelling work when she was younger would probably have been pointless, or even counterproductive.
If you have spelling books, apps, or tips that work in your own family, please share in the comments. In a previous post, readers recommended a letter tiles app from All About Reading, an Oxford University Press programme (possibly only available in Australia?), and the app Sir Linkalot. If you’d like to add your own suggestions or praise of these recommendations, please do!
Regular readers will have seen me mention
’s forthcoming book, It’s Not Fair. Eloise is holding two London events and a launch day at East Kent Sudbury. (You need to book all three in advance):Waterstones Trafalgar Square, 19th June, 7pm-9pm. In conversation with Emma Svanberg, author of Parenting for Humans.
Parade’s End Books, Richmond-upon-Thames, 27th June, 6.30-8.30pm.
At East Kent Sudbury you can go along for a day of conversation on children’s liberation as Eloise launches her groundbreaking manifesto for children’s rights.
For new readers, Eloise wrote a guest post for me about what home education with her daughter looks like when putting children’s rights and her daughter’s consent at the heart of her education.
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(The photo for this post is by Ryan Wallace on Unsplash.)
So this is my perspective on it all…
My eldest went to school. He’s now in sixth form college. I have quite a few of his old school books. Whilst in primary school, starting in year two I think (the year my youngest would be in were she in school), maybe even in year one, my son had weekly spellings to learn, and tests. He did… okay on them. He was more proficient in his times table tests, but his spelling wasn’t abysmal or anything; probably in the top third of his class maybe? He can spell pretty well now (though you wouldn’t know it from his texts. I know he wants something when I get a proper message instead of a ‘k’ or a ‘ye’!)
Anyway, I’ve never ‘done’ spellings with my youngest. Instead, when she doesn’t know how to spell something, she asks me, and I tell her. I get a little bit of input from her (e.g. “what letter do you think it starts with?” “So it starts with a T, and there’s an ‘ow’ sound. Do you think it’s ‘ow’ or ‘ou’ or something else?” etc.) but mainly I just write it down on the mini whiteboard and she copies it down.
When she started doing more ‘free’ writing - as in, just writing something by/for herself, for the sake of it, so no input from me (although she does sometimes ask for spellings anyway) - I noticed something.
*Her spellings are at almost *exactly* the same ‘level’ my son’s were at, in his school work, from the same age.*
Even the spelling mistakes are sometimes *identical* (e.g. goast for ghost, baech for beach, and so on). This is despite these being the exact kinds of words that my eldest would bring home each week to ‘revise’. In fact if anything I’d say my youngest is *marginally* ‘ahead’ of where he was in terms of mixing up vowel digraphs.
Now, I know that’s a sample size of two. But I can’t help but think that to an extent, for *some*, maybe even many children, much of spelling just comes naturally, over time; the more a kid sees a word written down, the more they get a sort of ‘feel’ for whether something’s spelt correctly. They might not immediately know the *right* spelling, but they’ll know if something looks *wrong* and can look it up / ask a parent / ask the dictionary - or even, if they have access to such a thing, ask Alexa or a similar device. And the main thing that helps with this? Reading. Lots and lots of reading. Including reading aloud with an adult - I find this in particular helps children spot that some spellings differ from book to book [e.g. - appropriately enough - ‘spelled’ vs ‘spelt’, where the former is more common with American English and the latter with British English].
As it happens, I do think some children *won’t* just pick up spellings. Dyslexic children in particular might benefit from additional support and more specific, detailed explanations of various spelling ‘rules’ and so on. [My daughter is autistic and for arithmetic I’ve found she needs to be explicitly taught various strategies rather than ‘catching’ them (the mantra ‘strategies should be caught, not taught’ definitely doesn’t apply to her wrt arithmetic).] But dyslexia will usually show up in other areas too and quite early on potentially (British Dyslexia Association has some useful info on early indicators).
I have a good program for Americans/Canadians if you have a kid that just doesn't get it and is really frustrated by spelling. This program I'm recommending is a BEAST and takes several years to work through, but for a certain type of kid (i.e., mine) it's been a lifesaver. She was just not able to learn spelling through memorization or familiarization. It's called Logic of English. The younger kids' program is called Foundations, and the upper elementary/middle kids' program is called Essentials. It's based on The Logic of English book by Denise Eide. It works through the origins of English words and WHY they are all spelled so differently, coming up with a list of spelling "rules" that must be memorized initially, but quickly become intuitive. My daughter is a fantastic reader at age 10, thanks to the "All About Reading" program, but her spelling was dismal. She gets very frustrated and wants to know "but WHY is it spelled like that?" She has come along incredibly well since we began LOE Essentials a year ago. It's a lot of work for the parent, but it has been so worth it and has had the side benefit that I've become rather interested in the structure of our language myself. It also covers grammar and vocabulary, and can be modified to include handwriting as well, if that's needed.