Quick strategies to identify, support and develop spelling skills in the Primary classroom

The rich history of the English language makes it a vibrant, colourful language to learn, full of interesting etymology, but it also means it is full of irregularities and inconsistencies, which poses a real challenge for spelling.

Once you’ve identified areas of strength and areas for improvement in your students’ spelling using Cambridge Primary Insight, you can focus on supporting and developing their skills.

Broadly speaking, as a teacher of spelling, you need to:

1. Develop phonetic awareness
2. Support the memorisation of spelling rules and irregular words by heart
3. Ensure repeated exposure to irregular words in appropriate contexts.

For all three, you need a sequence, and this will largely be led by the age of the children you are teaching and potentially what you are teaching them, too.

A whole-school approach to spelling in primary schools is ideal and this can lead to each year group formulating their own spelling lists or lists of spelling rules. In some schools, districts or countries such lists may be provided, and in others a collaborative approach to determining key words and spelling rules may be needed.

How can you develop spelling skills in the classroom?

To support schools and teachers further, we’ve introduced teaching and learning guidance for our primary baseline assessment – an online tool which offers:

1. Pedagogical advice on how students of different ages and abilities in spelling, reading, mathematics and arithmetic can be best supported in the classroom, regardless of the curriculum you’re teaching;
2. Activity suggestions which are accompanied by teacher notes, planning tools or student worksheets;
3. Extra resources to support further professional development or offer additional reading on key topics.

Whatever teaching and learning programme you have in place, we recommend an explicit and routine approach to teaching spelling. For upper primary students this might look like:

1. Introduce 8-10 words per week (less for younger children), writing them or displaying them on a board. Initially ask students to copy them down.
2. Read the words out loud, syllabicating them so students can develop their phonic understanding. Ask students to repeat back your syllabication several times, before saying the word in full, fluently.
3. Ask the students to discuss any patterns that they notice between the words. Take feedback.
4. Explicitly teach the phonetic sound or spelling rule you have chosen for this week. Use multiple examples so students can see how it works in different contexts.
5. Give the students time to use these words in their own sentences.
6. Create regular opportunities for students to use these spellings in written and oral contexts, aiding their transfer into the long-term memory. Cognitive science strategies such as active recall, spaced learning and dual coding can often be useful.