Teaching Children to Spell

Spelling is one of those subjects that either comes easily or makes you want to pull your hair out.  With five children, I got more than one of each, spanning the spectrum.

People talk about teaching your children to “sight read”.  Eventually, we all sight read.  We don’t use phonics to sound out words we have become accustomed to reading.  However, if you run across the word “otorhinolaryngologist”, chances are you had to sound it out to read it, using phonics.

With my kinesthetic learner, we walked through phonics.  Every diphthong, every blend, every sound.  We walked through them all.  By the end of Kindergarten he was reading well.  When we started spelling in first grade, it was easy for him, as he employed phonics. 

When we got to fourth grade, and we started learning more spelling rules “i before e except after c”, when to double the consonant and delineating between “hoping” and “hopping”, it was a seamless transition.  My eldest son was off to a good start with spelling.

Part of it I credited to using Bob Jones University Press Spelling.  According to the teacher’s manual I was supposed to give a pre-test, a mid-week test, and a final test on Friday.  The way I managed it without spending 30 minutes on spelling every day, was to record the spelling words from the chapter on a cassette tape.  He actually found it fun to give himself the pre-test with the cassette player and earphones.  At the beginning of the school year, it would take me maybe an hour to go through all of the words in the entire book, even with making up sentences as I went.  I said the word, used the word in a sentence, and then said the word again.  It worked well for us.  The demise came with my younger children and the cassette player broke and we were never able to replace it!

In fifth grade, he decided he wanted to participate in the school spelling bee.  Maybe that is an understatement.  He decided he wanted to WIN the school spelling bee.  We were given a list of 500 words that defied all of the rules.  At the end of the list, we discovered words that even I didn’t know!  Yes, fifth grade spelling bee words.

Now things were getting serious, and I ended up spending 30 minutes a day on spelling bee words with him.  These weren’t coming so easy to my kinesthetic learner, so we adapted to his learning/memorization style.  He needed to write out all of these words.  Since I was working with younger kids too, we used many different styles to get it!  Here are some of the things we did:

1.        Filled the cookie sheet with shaving cream and had him spell the words in the shaving cream.

2.       Spell out words in matchbox cars on the family room floor.

3.       Filled the cookie sheet with salt and had him spell words there.

4.       Used the sand box to spell out words.

5.       The most messy, but effective?  We had brick columns in our front yard, along with a brick porch.  In each individual brick he would write a spelling word with chalk.  As he got more advanced, and we had to look up more words, he would lump them into groups, or roots.  “Theism” had its own section, as did “neuro-”!  And then you had all of the “-ologies”!  Latin roots, plurals, you name it, it had a section.

Everyday I’d set the timer for 30 minutes, and he would work through the list of words.  Needless to say, he was very successful at the Spelling Bees.  And even more importantly, the vocabulary on the PSAT.  More on that later.

Student number two was visual.  Sight reading was easy for her.  By Christmas time in Kindergarten she was reading chapter books.  Phonics got pushed to the side.

I started noticing trouble with spelling in Second grade.  Since we hadn’t done phonics, it was hard for her to decide when to use an “i” and when to use an “e”.  The schwa sound was foreign to her and she didn’t know how to manage it in a word. 

Much to her dismay, I insisted on going back through phonics with her.  It took us about ½ a year, but in the end, I totally felt like it was worth it.  The spelling bee for her was a natural.  No writing hundreds of words on different textures.  She would read it, sound it out if she had to, look up the definition, the origin, and maybe make an index card.  I worked with her for 30 minutes on spelling bee words starting in 5^th grade.  When the timer would go off, she would continue working on her own.   She was VERY successful at the Spelling Bees, and again, more importantly on the vocabulary on the PSAT.

In fact, she was the one who called it to my attention.  When my eldest got his PSAT scores back, he was strong in math, which I expected.  I was surprised when he did really well in the vocabulary section of the PSAT.  The next year, she took the PSAT and had a perfect score on the vocabulary.  As I was comparing scores, I commented on the perfect vocabulary scores.  She said, matter-of-factly, “Well, of course mom, those were all of the spelling bee words.”  Something my younger three didn’t want to hear, because it gave me the resolve to work through the spelling bee words with all of them!  Over the course of 4 years, we would cover about 2000 words.

Two more of mine have taken the PSAT, and so far, only one vocabulary word has been missed!

The verdict is still out for my fifth student.  My elementary spelling program fell apart when the cassette player became obsolete.  I have one more that learned to sight read, and we’re still struggling with spelling because I didn’t go back and do phonics with him like I did the older one that learned to sight read.  We also skipped the spelling bee for the most part.  I’m hoping that with some diligence, we’ll get through the elementary spelling program, and get the through the words on the spelling bee lists.  I’m hoping that reading out loud will still help, and we can walk through pronunciations, origins, and meanings of hundreds of words before he has to take the PSAT.

I have 1 year.  Let’s see what I can get done.