1. Ashdene Primary School 27th September 2017
Spelling Workshop
Ashdene Primary School
27th September 2017

2. Why is spelling such a challenge?
Begin with phonics. Supports both reading and writing.
C_A_T
‘oo’. Book or soon
Graphemes with more than one phoneme. E.g. A = ai, ay, ae, a_e, a.
People seem to class themselves as either being a good speller or not. Show of hands, who is a good speller. Both children and adults struggle with spelling buy why? It is fundamental to our everyday life. We do it all day everyday – so why is it so difficult?
Work through difficulty: Single graphemes, two graphemes…

3. 7 ways to pronounce ‘ough’
Challenge – how many words can you think of for each one?

4. Why is spelling such a challenge?
mortgage colonel
rhyme rhythm
queue weird
cemetery secretary
conscious - conscience
explain – explanation
four – forty
twelve – twelfth
definite desperate
government parliament
necessary accommodate
committee correspond
I googled ‘difficult spellings/commonly misspelt words’
Talk through difficulties with these spellings.
Not phonetic
Break rules weird. E before e.
Suffixes – ery and –ary
Verbs to nouns, why change letters? Similarly with numbers.
Suffix –ite, -ate
Silent letters
Minefield of double letters.
How many can you spell?
All underlined words our children should know by the end of year 6.

5. Rules and Patterns

6. Rules and patterns - plurals
Adding s and es to words to make plurals.
If the ending sounds like /s/ or /z/, it is spelt as –s.
If the ending sounds like /ɪz/ and forms an extra syllable or ‘beat’ in the word, it is spelt as –es.
cats, dogs, spends, rocks, thanks, catches
Start with an easy one. A rules still applies to know if to add an e or not.

7. Rules and patterns - suffixes
Adding the suffixes –ing, –ed and –er, -est to root words
If the root word ends in two consonant letters (the same or different), the ending is simply added on.
Hunt - hunting, hunted, hunter.
Jump – jumped, jumping.
If the root word ends vowel, consonant, then the consonant is doubled to keep the vowel sound short.
Drop – dropped, dropping
Sad – sadder, saddest
Note the difference in the vowel sound between hoping and hopping.
If the root word ends consonant –e then the e is dropped.
Applies to children across year groups. Adding these endings is first introduced in y1. Rules for doubling, changing and dropping letters is introduced to children in Y2 and 3.

8. Tips and tricks Can you remember the rule?
Are there any reminders, rhymes etc for this rule?
Does it look right? If children has come across it in reading they subconsciously recognise the spelling.
Games to reinforce this: ‘past tense penguin’ phonics play. Google suffix rules for many more.

9. Word families
Word families are groups of words that have a common feature, pattern or meaning. They usually share a common base or root word, to which different prefixes and suffixes are added.
Real
Reality, unrealistic, realisation,

10. Rules and patterns – suffixes cont.
If the root word ends consonant y then the y is changed to an i. (not for ing as would create double ii)
Happy – happiness, happier, happiest
If the last syllable of a word is stressed, the final consonant letter is doubled before any ending beginning with a vowel letter is added
Forget – forgetting. Begin – beginning.
The consonant letter is not doubled if the syllable is unstressed.
Garden – gardening, gardener.

11. The suffix –ation (verb to noun)
The suffix –ly (adjective to adverb) If the root word ends with –ic, –ally is added rather than just –ly,
The suffix –ous
–tion, –sion, –ssion, –cian
There are many more. All in your pack in the national curriculum spelling appendix.

12. Rules and patterns - prefixes
Important to understand the meaning. Gives the spelling some context
re– means ‘again’ or ‘back’.
sub– means ‘under’.
inter– means ‘between’ or ‘among’.
super– means ‘above’.
anti– means ‘against’.
auto– means ‘self’ or ‘own’.
Full list on national curriculum appendix printout.

13. Other memorable rules. Verbs = S, Nouns = C
Practise, practice; advise, advice; devise, device.
i before e except after c.
How many exceptions can you think of?
Weird reign eight their

14. What can we do?
There may be many rules to spelling which sound complicated but children are sponges!
Rules and patterns need to be continually reinforced at school and at home rather than just a correction of the spelling. Use the same strategies (see list)
Traditional method of simply learning individual words isn’t transferring to writing.
Children probably more capable of improving their spelling through learning rules than we adults are!

15. What can we do?
There are always exceptions. Once children know the rule, they can learn the exceptions. Much more likely to remember a small handful of words which differ than how to spell every single word individually.
Reading – point out words and spellings. What other word is spelt this way/follows this rule? Explore a root word. What suffixes could we add.
Particular spellings continually misspelling – display them!
Language: phonemes/sounds, graphemes/letters; root word, prefix, suffix; word family.

16. Mnemonics Rhythm helps your two hips move – Rhythm
Big elephants can always understand smaller elephants – because
There’s a rat in separate
I do not believe a lie – believe
You hear with your ear – hear (homophones – here)
Pieces of pie - pieces

17. Spelling tennis
Useful for commonly misspelt words. High frequency or ‘tricky’ unusual spellings.
Read the word aloud. Then, without looking, take it in turns to say the next letter.
Requires you to visualise the word.
Becomes more memorable.

18. Simple, traditional games
Hangman and anagrams.
Requires the player to think of graphemes (letters that make a sound together), spelling strings, rules and patterns.
Begin to recognise words from its parts.

19. A D C R T I O N Y I

21. Slot, soot, soon, sown

22. Activities that involve segmenting words into their graphemes and/or spelling strings - particularly prefixes and suffixes.
Whole selection of games in your pack, along with the methods used in our spelling programme and the rules from the national curriculum.
Reinforce – teaching patterns and rules, not just learning spellings by rote.