There is a big gap between sending home spelling lists and teaching spelling, but taking the time to close that gap is worth it in so many ways, not least for those students who will otherwise go through life saying “I can’t spell”. This photo, used by permission, was posted on a … Read More
Do you play spelling games in your classroom? If yes, do you use Scrabble tiles or similar? If you’re trying to help your students create a consistent spelling strategy which also supports word reading, be cautious with spelling games. If you’re playing games with letters rather than graphemes, you’re unlikely to make … Read More
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 usually go with the descriptive syllable method with a slight tweak in favour of suffixes … Read More
I was working with a severely dyslexic 27-year-old whose huge sight vocabulary put him beyond That Reading Thing lessons for reading but not for spelling. He struggled with the idea of words as collections of sounds because he had spent years developing his own strategies for reading and spelling – often applying … Read More
If you love etymonline.com for exploring the history of words, here’s another rich resource, a dictionary of British English spelling (one dialect only) arranged by phonemes with their corresponding graphemes (for spelling) and graphemes with their corresponding phonemes (for reading). It’s not a lightweight book and, like etymonline, contains more information than … Read More
This is going to be a short post but it’s accompanied by a four page pdf to get you started. It’s another chance to stress three important things about teaching spelling. 1. You can avoid potentially confusing rules if you have consistent spelling conversations about syllables sounds graphemes endings suffixes 2. Don’t … Read More
This is a guest post by Georgina Mavor, an experienced literacy tutor who works with children, young people and adults who often come with significant barriers to learning, particularly dyslexia. When people ask if TRT and TST work for dyslexics, my answer is, ‘Yes but more slowly than for those without’. This … Read More
Whenever I get talking to a teacher about spelling, I offer them my brilliant idea that every school should, in the first couple of weeks of the first term, have a ‘-tion Day’ when each first-year student and teacher will adopt a useful word ending in -tion (that spelling only). By the … Read More
This is a slightly modified excerpt from That Spelling Thing. Bundling by tricky code <ough> isn’t a common grapheme but it occurs in very common words and it worries people because <ough> words look so similar. However, by thinking in sounds and using the TST script, anxious spellers no longer have to … Read More