Help Your Struggling Spellers with These Great Tips
May 22, 2008
Do your students struggle on spelling tests? For every easy word like “cat” or “dog” you have tricky ones like “perceive” or “through.” It’s as if the English language were designed to fool people. “I before E except after C?” Capricious and arbitrary, if you ask me. And why would you have silent letters? Are they spares in case other letters in the word break down?
Education.com has a few spelling tips designed for teachers and parents in their article, The Fast Track to Spelling Success. One method they advocate is the “Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check,” method:
“Ask your child to write his spelling words in the first column, one underneath the other.
- Look. Ask your child to look at the word and read it aloud. For example, “friend”
- Say. Then spell the word letter by letter while continuing to look at it. “f-r-i-e-n-d”
- Cover. Your child should now cover the word “friend” (either with her hand, another piece of paper or by folding that column underneath the others) and try to write “friend” in the second column, without looking at the first column.
- Check. Now, have your child check her work by comparing the first column with the second column. If it’s correct, move on to the second word. If it’s incorrect, ask her to repeat the steps, this time trying to write “friend” in the third column.”
The article also has other ideas for different learning styles. My favorite, designed for the kids who can’t sit still, is to have them practice spelling while doing a physical activity, such as jumping rope, shouting out a letter with each jump (also a good way to burn off some of their extra energy).
All the methods listed in this article require lots of practice. However, if you follow their advice, that practice will be more productive – and more fun. -BILL FERRIS
The Fast Track to Spelling Success via education.com
Welcome to the Carnival of Education Career Fair! We’ve retracted the bleachers and set up the booths on the gymnasium floor so these brave teachers can see what they might be doing if they weren’t teaching (perish the thought).
In a May 4 article titled “
The web is a wonderful place, full of exciting activities, and interesting information, but like many a Golden City, it has it’s potholes, and those become really noticeable when you teach primary age students (five to eight year olds here in the States). There are lots of sites that are safe, and many that are interactive, but there are few safe, non-commercial sites for kids to meet other children in a social network. The folks at Children’s Television Workshop are neatly filling this void by providing 
Not to toot my own horn, but at a very young age, I was identified as AG (Academically Gifted). I spent my first few years in school in a separate class with other AG students, doing artsy things, solving puzzles and doing lots of creative writing. I think, for the most part, this was very helpful in my academic development. I often noticed, though, that I felt very out of place as I progressed in school. I felt somehow disjointed from many of my peers, and so I often only put in the bare minimum amount of effort to get me by. Nonetheless, I’ll be forever grateful for those teachers who were willing and able to provide me with instruction that gave me the stuff I needed to succeed and later go on to college and finally apply myself in the capacity I knew I was capable of. Sure, I’m smart – but we all know that; its the next generation that we need to keep an eye on.
Raid your pantry for snacks and educational funding. Since 1996, General Mills has raised more than $200 million for K-8 schools with their 
They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Well, if you’d like to get at said treasure without trekking across town to yard sales or digging through garbage cans on the side of the road, You might want to take a look at 
