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.

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.

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

• 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."

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.