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:
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.
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Lower end of Primary |
Focus is on letter-sound recognition and spelling using phonetic awareness. At this stage encourage ‘play’ with sounds, words and spelling, building phonological confidence before slowly guiding towards simple spelling rules. For very young children writing in sand or chalk or playing online spelling games can support this ‘play’. |
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Upper end of Primary |
Children have acquired phonetic awareness, so you are more likely to be focused on the teaching of spelling rules and exception words (in context). However, you still need to know what has been taught before: what rules and exceptions your students already know. |
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.
To support schools and teachers further, we’ve introduced teaching and learning guidance for our primary baseline assessment – an online tool which offers:
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:
Around 50% of the words in the English language can be syllabicated: meaning they can be divided into syllables which correspond to the phonetic sounds of a language. If a child knows the sound-letter correlation for s, a and t, they can spell sat. For the other half, memorisation of the word’s spelling is required.
In reading, word recognition is generally acquired by repeated exposure to and usage of words, but in spelling, we can support this process a little more with the teaching of specific spelling rules and exceptions. Though it is important to note that we cannot get away from the importance of memorisation when supporting children to spell.
Memorisation is critical to learning, as we know from the explosion of research in cognitive science in recent decades. We know that the short-term working memory is critical for some tasks like remembering the steps we need to take during a science experiment or preparing for an end of topic test or exam. But for spelling, we need to activate the long-term memory, enabling spelling to become automatic and therefore reducing the cognitive load when children use writing as the medium to express their skills and knowledge. That will require a dual approach, a support of both phonics and word recognition together.
If you’d like to find out more about supporting your Primary students with their spelling skills, check out this free guide to planning your spelling support.