Assessing & Teaching Spelling

Objective

• Students will be able to identify, describe and apply various instructional approaches to spelling instruction.

phonetic spelling

• This is used to help students sound out the words. Students are encouraged to spell the words like they sound.

phonetic spelling

• This strategy is often the first taught to students.
• In the first grade room I am working in, many students come up to me asking for help with spelling. I will ask them to sound the word out, and they can spell it most of the time because they are hearing the sounds.

Rule-based instruction

• Once students have learned to sound a word out, they start to learn to spell words with combined letter sounds, such as about, church, judge, and others.
• Along with this, they learn the rule that goes with each letter combination.

rule-based instruction

• I worked with a first grader who was starting to read. I noticed that she came to words like "about," and tried to sound it out but couldn't quite get it. I wrote the word down, along with some other similar ones, and explained the "ou" rule to her. It took some time, but it clicked!

visual spelling strategies

• When spelling homophones like tail/tale and seller/cellar, visual strategies help the student figure out if they are spelling the word correctly.

Visual spelling strategies

• To help students with visual spelling memory, you could use a word bank on a worksheet. The bank could have words focused on one rule, like combining "ou," or spelling homophones.

visual spelling strategies

• A 7th grader I teach piano to was at her lesson one night. She spelled out a music vocabulary word and said, "This doesn't look right." I helped her a little bit, and she was able to come up with the correct spelling.

Morphemic spelllng strategies

• This is kind of like knowing how to morph one word into another.
• This teaches how to spell words related to another word, such as mathematics and mathematician.
• This type of instruction also focuses on learning to add prefixes, endings, compound words, and abbreviations.

Morphemic spelling strategies

• The first grader I mentioned earlier was writing something down one time I was with her. She sounded out the base word, which she spelled correctly, and then realized that she could just add the "-ing" ending to it to get the correct form. I think this type of instruction helps students to associate things while spelling.

Phonological Awareness

• This is an essential component of spelling because it is all about knowing the sound of the word, or how the sounds blend together.

Phonological Awareness

• I was giving a first-grader a make-up spelling test the other day. When I said the word, I noticed her saying it to herself quietly. I thought it was cool because she was applying the sound of the word to the spelling.

Knowledge of Orthography

• This is the knowledge of the rules of writing language. These include spelling, capitalization, hyphenation, word breaks, and punctuation.

Knowledge of Orthography

• This is important to spelling because it has students use the proper hyphenation and capitalization. No wonder why my elementary teachers counted words wrong without the proper capitalization on spelling tests.

Vocabulary

• This component of spelling is important because students not only learn how to spell the word, but what it means as well. Knowing what the word means will help the student to remember how to spell it.

Vocabulary

• To tie vocabulary and spelling together, a couple of my teachers had us look up each spelling word in the dictionary and write our own definition to it. In order to get a 100% on the assignment, we had to have a correct definition and have the word spelled correctly.

Morphology

• Morphology is when you have a root word, such as bend, and you morph it into another word, like bending and bent. It is important in spelling because morphology allows students to be able to spell the derivitaves of root word just by knowing a couple of rules. Once you know how to spell the root word, you could know how to spell all of the other forms of that word.

Semantic Relationships

• Semantics is the study of meaning. Much like with vocabulary, being able to associate the spelling of the word with the meaning of the word will help the student with both aspects.

Mental Orthographic Images

• This is a fancy phrase for "sight words." These are words that do not follow the words of phonics, such as yacht and phone.

Mental Orthographic Images

• Sight words can be practiced in so many ways, it is ridiculous. There are countless apps to download, Word Walls in the classroom, flashcards, Go Fish games, Memory games, and many others.

Mental Orthographic Images

• The Word Wall has become a staple in the modern classroom. I like it because students can look up and see what words they are looking for.
• I also like the idea of playing games with sight words like Around the World, Go Fish, and Memory because they are perfect for the hands-on learner. Everyone could benefit from it.

Sources

• www.allaboutlearningpress.com - "Effective Spelling Strategies"