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