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A treasure from 2005: how to morph That Reading Thing into That Spelling Thing for a dyslexic adult. I was working with a severely dyslexic 27-year-old whose huge sight vocabulary put him beyond TRT lessons for reading but not for spelling. He struggled with the idea of words as collections of sounds … Read More

Leading a session with a group of secondary teachers from various departments, I boldly ask for words their students struggle to spell so I can show them how our strategies work. The maths teacher says, ‘isosceles’. Oh, super. Have I mentioned that I’m a normal speller? That Spelling Thing doesn’t come out … Read More

Here’s the second part of thinking about making up sentences as a way of remembering how to spell words. ‘Big elephants can always understand small elephants’ is by far the most popular one I’ve heard at all levels. What’s the alternative and why is it better? When you’ve got a word that … Read More

Click on a line to jump to the post. Will open in a new tab. Part 1 Intro to Mnemonics Part 2 Making up sentences to remember how to spell words Part 3 Building ‘because’ instead of the elephant story Making up sentences to remember how to spell words Making up sentences … Read More

Click on a line to jump to the post. Will open in a new tab. Part 1 Intro to Mnemonics Part 2 Making up sentences to remember how to spell words Part 3 Building ‘because’ instead of the elephant story Intro to Mnemonics Thinking up mnemonics (memory devices or tricks) is second … Read More

Today’s guest blog is from Georgina Mavor, a literacy specialist and senior That Reading Thing trainer from Western Australia. Her background in psychology gives such depth to her work with students who struggle to read and write. I’m thrilled to be able to share her wisdom here. In That Spelling Thing workshops, … Read More

 Create a culture of spelling in your classroom by following these 5 steps. That Spelling Thing is a dynamic, fun and memory-friendly alternative to look/cover/write/check. Join the TST community by connecting on Twitter or Facebook.

When you hear ‘syllables’, do you think about how a word appears in a dictionary? Or split across the lines in a book? Or do you think of ‘6 types of syllables’? In That Reading Thing we go mostly with the descriptive syllable method with a slight tweak in favour of suffixes … Read More