Spelling! It’s everyone’s demon!
If your school has a dynamic phonics/spelling program in K-2, then spelling may not be such an issue.
However, many schools don’t, and anyway, you’re teaching 3-8. Your daily schedule may have 0 minutes allotted for spelling instruction, so now what?
1. Teach students how to use spell checkers. I know this might seem obvious, but I’ve had 5th graders who just ignored the red underlines that designate misspelled words. They honestly didn’t know what those lines meant or how to respond to them.
2. Post common spelling rules and refer to them often. See the Spelling section of my Teachers Pay Teachers store for FREE posters, here.
3, When you write longer words in front of students, model breaking the word into syllables to spell it. For example, if I were writing the word “constitution”, my monologue might go like this: “con, that’s c-o-n, sti, s-t-i, tu, t-u, tion. . .oh I remember that ‘shun’ at the end of a word is usually spelled ‘tion’ That’s con-sti-tu-tion”. Modeling this way helps students avoid just writing a jumble of letters that they semi-remember from seeing the word.
4. And speaking of the ending to the word “constitution”, you can teach students common syllables and their spellings, even in 7th and 8th grades. Post the spellings with examples so students can refer to them. Here are some examples:
- /shun/ is usually spelled “tion”. Examples: nation, motion, caution, contradiction, conversation, addition
- /zhun/ is usually spelled “sion”. Examples: television, erosion, division, decision
- /chur/ is usually spelled “ture”. Examples: adventure, fracture, scripture, lecture
- /zhur/ is usually spelled “sure”. Examples: closure, treasure, exposure, measure
5. Address common misspelled words. You can find a list of these words on my Teachers Pay Teachers store here. The list also includes some hints to help students know which word to choose and how to spell it. I recommend:
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- Post the list, or give students individual hole-punched copies to put in a 3 ring binder, or both.
- After you introduce the list, have students read it with you every day for a week or two. This will take less than a minute a day, but it will help students become acquainted with what’s on the list and the clues that are there to help.