- I created a chart of three things that a student must try first before asking how to spell a word. This is posted around the room and used as a reminder for all students throughout the year.
1. Try spelling it yourself first.
2. Look it up.
3. Ask a friend. Then check it in the dictionary.
4. Ask the teacher for help sounding out the word.
- For students who have trouble spelling, it's a good idea to have them keep a notebook of words they misspell a lot or words they encounter that are difficult for them to spell. Have them refer to this list when writing drafts. They could even keep it posted on their desk.
- Keep a word wall of misspelled words you see that the class makes all the time. Include these words as bonus words on spelling tests.
- Play the spelling game SPARKLE with highly misspelled words.
- Have students come up with their own word lists from their independent reading books. Make this a routine.
Question of the Day: What spelling tricks can you pull out of your hat?
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One hundred and twenty two years ago, I was a phychology student in college. One course I took was an Educational Psychology class and as a requirement for the course, I had to go observe a class and teacher once a week for that semester.
It was a fruitless endeavor. For instance, one week my assignment was to produce a map of how the teacher moved around the classroom by charting her position every five minutes. Yeh. Right. Wednesday mornings were spent with her reading groups. And she either stood up to dismiss one group and call up the next or sat at that nasty low kiddie table reading about Spot, Dick and Jane.
Meanwhile, the spelling words for the week were on the blackboard and students were supposed to write sentences using those words.
"How do you spell ...?" became the one thing I dealt with. I wasn't supposed to do anything in the classroom except my observations and assignments. But since I couldn't do my assignments, I figured I might as well help the students with theirs.
Most of the children were familiar with Sesame Street and knew their alphabet pretty well. One by one, I ended up teaching the kids how to use a dictionary to figure our how to find a word you have no idea how to spell.
We wrote out the alphabet on a paper so that it was all on one line. We pronounced the word and decided what letter it started with, found that letter on the line and estimated how far through the alphabet it was.
We then would open the dictionary to a spot we thought might be about as far through the book as the letter was through the alphabet.
By comparing where we were in the book to where we needed to be in the dictionary, we decided whether to go forward or backward. Once we found the correct starting letter, we now did similar activities to determine which direction we needed to go to find what we thought might be the second letter of the word. And so on.
Amazingly, after a few weeks, most students just went to get dictionaries for themselves and bypassed me all together when they wanted to find out how to spell a word.
Other kids got creative and found other ways to express what they wanted to say using only those words they already knew how to spell.
Either solution to their problem resulted in some unique sentences from the fall-term second graders. It was fun, even if their teacher was boring.
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