Especially for Teachers - About English

• Word searches

These may be done orally or in combination with the written form of the words. Start by providing two or three examples of words that have a common beginning sound; say ball, bears, and butter for the/b/ sound. Have children look all around the room and offer other words that begin with the same sound.  

Word searches can begin from a story stimulus. In the following example a rhyme which contained many words with the /c/ sound was the beginning of learning about the variety of ways /c/ can be represented.

	Children spent time searching in books for words which had the /c/ sound.
Finally the teacher worked with the students to collate their search by categorising the different letters representing the /c/ sound.

Teaching word families and onset and rimes

• Word families

Word families are groups of rhyming words made by changing the first letter or letter group; for example bat-sat-cat-rat- or keep-sleep-creep-deep. For any word family, write words with the same pattern on strips of paper then cut between the beginning letter(s) 'onset' and the word stem (-at. -eep) 'rime'.  

Put the 'rimes' in a column on a pocket chart; distribute the initial letters 'onsets' amongst the children. Model making the words by placing one letter to the left of the 'rime' to make a whole word (deep). Then have the children place their 'onsets' with a 'rime'. Write all the words in one family on a large chart and display it.

• Whole to part phonics (onset and rime)

Choose predictable stories or rhymes. For each story, have one big book and at least one little book for every two children in the group. Poems, songs and language experience stories may be included.

The Hungry Giant is used in this example.

1. Initially read the story as a read-aloud to the whole class. With emergent readers teach the story by having it as shared reading twice each day until the children have memorised the language of the story. Once the children have memorised the story, begin partner reading

2. Demonstrate partner reading. Show children how to sit side-by-side. Teach children to ask their partner, "Do you want think time or help?" when they are stuck on a word. Have children take turns reading the story to their partners.

3. On subsequent days repeat shared reading and partner reading with the story. When children can 'read' the story, teach letter-sound correspondences in the text.

4. Ask the children their favourite words in the story. As each child chooses a word, write it on a blank card with the logo representing that particular story and ask the children to find the word in the story.

honey

5. After class, plan the letter-onset, letter-rime, or letter-syllable correspondences you will teach in the words the children have chosen. If you find matching patterns across words, teach those patterns if appropriate.

6. The next day, in front of the class, highlight the letters you have chosen to teach, saying for example, "I'm putting a yellow square around the h in honey, h says /h/. Do you hear the /h/ in honey?"

7. After you have highlighted letters in the words place them on a word wall according to their highlighted letters. Notice that home and hit are placed under h as that is the letter highlighted, however flying and riding are placed under i as it is the ing which is highlighted.

8. Check to see if the highlighted letters in the words that have been grouped together have multiple pronunciations (e.g. the g in get and giant; the -ow in know and now). Talk to the children about the different pronunciations of the same letters and colour the letters that represent a second pronunciation a second colour.

9. Repeat the cycle with other predictable stories.

10. As the phonics word wall becomes crowded, take down word families (e.g. flying, riding, skating) put each family on a ring, and put them in the class literacy centre.

For more information, visit Margaret Moustafa's web site.

Developing visual memory and the visual coding mechanism

Expert spellers visualise words. They retrieve an image of what the word looks like, they visualise it in their mind's eye. Most poor spellers cannot do that. When asked to spell an unfamiliar word, a poor speller spells it like it sounds. One of the tasks of teachers is to use instructional techniques designed to improve children's abilities to visually store and retrieve words. The visual coding mechanism is elusive and complex. It is not simple visual memory or a learning style.

• Kim’s Game
  In this game, a collection of objects is arranged on a tray, for students to memorise. When the objects are covered over, students try to remember as many of them as they can. A more advanced version of the game involves removing one of the objects, and asking students to identify what is missing.

• Memory sentences
  Write a sentence on the board with words that most or all of the students can spell easily. Read the sentence and have students look carefully at each word. Then cover the sentence and have students write the sentence from memory. Uncover the sentence and have them note to themselves words they missed or misspelled. Don' t make a test out of this; its purpose is to have children practice using their visual memory every day.

• Sorting words by length
  
• Making words
  Sets of letters and holders or boards are needed for this activity. Pass out the letters needed to make words in a particular word family. Have children place their vowel letter/s in the middle of their holders. Demonstrate with large letter cards in your pocket chart. Then as you call out words and give a context sentence, have children put the consonant letters in their holders to make the words from the word family in focus. As each word is made, have a child come up and make the word in your pocket chart.

• What looks right?
  Identify a rhyming pattern that has two different spellings; for example, -ane and -ain, -ite and ight. Write an example of each pattern at the top of two columns on the board. Give two students dictionaries and the job of being spelling checkers; all others have paper and pencils. Say a word that fits one of the two spelling patterns and give a context sentence; write it both ways on the board, once under each example word; for example, in the sentence 'The sun is very______today,' is the spelling word brite or bright? Have students predict which spelling 'looks right' and write the word under the correct example word, while the checkers check the dictionaries. Students make any necessary corrections on their papers. This activity helps students see that rhyming is an important clue to the spelling of similar words, but that seeing if it 'looks right' is also important.

Children have found rhyming pairs from Lynley Dodd books

• Read my mind
  Have students number a piece of scrap paper from one to five. As you call out a clue, have them write a word from the wall they think is the answer next to each number, spelling it from memory. Clue number one is that the word is from the Word Wall. Clues two through five help the students narrow the possibilities; for example, clue two may be 'It starts with a T'; three might be 'It has three syllables', four might be 'It is a time-related word' and five might be 'it rhymes with borrow.' By the time you get to five, the children will already have figured out that the word is 'tomorrow.'

• Focus on key visual features of words perhaps through Spelling Journal activities
  
• Look at letter strings representing more complex sound units -ight, ous, ough also words containing the same letter string but with less predictable pronunciation e.g. bomb, comb, tomb

A sound pattern based on a letter string eg right, tight, might

• Investigate words containing silent letters e.g. scent, climb, knee, wrap, gnaw, debt

• Introduce the strategy of spelling by analogy where students are encouraged to spell swing by using their knowledge of sw in swim and ing in sing
  
• Introduce vowels used in combination with other letters aw, ar, ie, ea
  
• Provide practice in writing spelling words e.g. Make a Spellamadoodle
  
  
  

Developing awareness of structural patterns

• Prefix of the week
  Select a prefix each week. Have students look up the prefix in different dictionaries and compare the etymology (word history). Brainstorm and list as many words as can be thought of that begin with the prefix. Have them try to explain what the prefix means in each word. These words, written on posters, may become part of the Word Wall
• Word search race
  List words beginning with a certain prefix, as above. Have students work in teams to search newspapers and magazines for as many occurrences of those words, or others with the same prefix, as they can find in a given amount of time. At the end of the time each team counts all the words it found and checks to make sure that each one found really belongs to that category; for example, for the prefix re-, replay, repossess, and recant would be acceptable, but really and readership would not.
• Word Sorts
  Compare and contrast and categorise two or more words based on points of similarity or difference. Students may explore words containing the long "a" sound, as in pail, male and pay. Search for further words that fit into this category. Lists of words can be created. Generalisations or rules about the occurrence of the letter pattern can be developed. Give students cards with words to sort, such as back, sick, block, pluck, lock, rack, kick or 'ation' - inspiration, presentation, invitation, relation

Selection of words for study must be relevant to students' stage of development.    

                             

Open word sorts using Spelling Journal words  

Developing awareness of derivational patterns

Spellers at the transitional stage who are in the middle grades and beyond need to develop a level of spelling awareness that goes beyond the sound in words to a deeper level of relationships between and among words. These semantic or meaning patterns are encoded in base words and affixes, and in the related or derived forms of words sharing the same base. For example, receive, receiver, received, receiving, receipt, receivership, reception, receptionist, and receptor are derived forms of the same word. Study of the relationship between such groups of words gives transitional spellers a means of mastering many new words.

• Use word families to build knowledge of base words and their associated prefixes and suffixes play, plays, played, playing, playful, replay, player, playtime, playground

Activities from a Grade 5/6 word study book	Illustrate your spelling words to demonstrate understanding of the words’ meaning

• Concentration
  Two players or teams attempt to find as many related pairs as possible. Make a word card set that contains many pairs of related words (for example, various related forms of receive, decide, remember, and motion could be used), write them on cards, shuffle them, and lay them out in horizontal and vertical rows. Players take turns turning over pairs of cards. If they are related forms of the same word, they keep the pair and get points; if they are not related, the cards are turned back over.
   
• Word webs
  Words that are related by meaning will often have similar spelling patterns. Build webs of words to illustrate the relationships

Other suggestions:
Hand - handy, mishandle, handcraft, handcuff, handful, handle
Trans: meaning across - transport, translate, transform, transfusion, transfer
Port: meaning carry - transport, import, deport, porter, portable

Six spelling principles

Stages of spelling development

Word study activities -
• Activities for pre-communicative and semi-phonetic spellers
• Activities for semi-phonetic and phonetic spellers
• Activities for transitional and conventional spellers

Spelling strategies -
• Strategies for solving words
• Strategies for learning new words
• Phonetic strategies
• Visual strategies
• Morphemic strategies
• Reference to authority
• Connection strategies
• Memory joggers/gimmicks/mnemonics

Monitoring spelling -
• Spelling analysis
• Developmental spelling test

Implementing spelling -
• Word walls
• Spelling journals and individual spelling lists
• Through literature
• Proofreading

References