Understanding spelling

Spelling is a hard concept to learn for many children, with 42 basic phonetic sounds and 44 in total and over 250 ways to spell these sounds it is a hard skill to master.

Spelling is considered a much harder skill than reading to develop for the following reasons. Firstly because we spend more time reading than we do spelling, secondly it is easier to recognise a word than it is to reproduce it and thirdly there are more possible spellings for most words than there are possible ways to read them.

“Think about this for a minute: If you can spell a word you can read it, but being able to read a word does not guarantee you can spell it.” KELLI SANDMAN-HURLEY, Sep 29, 2015

So if spelling is a difficult skill to master how can we improve our ability to teach it? The following two posts discuss the concepts of:

  • Swapping the letter wall for a phoneme wall
  • Teaching the story of the word (etymology) 
  • Making spelling lists out of related words 

Dyslexia and Spelling: The Chicken or the Egg?

Making sense of words that don’t

Video – Making sense of spelling

One thought on “Understanding spelling

  1. Some excellent points. I know when in did the WRAP course i learnt so much about phonetic sounds, spelling and word origins. When you start with the background it became much easier to see why words are spelt they way they are.
    At school i don’t ever recall being taught many rules for spelling (other than the old favourites – “i before e except after c” and “change the y to an i and add es”). Looking at the phonetic sounds and rules associated with spelling in the WRAP program gave a me a much clearer understanding of spelling. For those students that struggle with simply memorising the spelling of words, knowing why something is spelt like it is can be really empowering.

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