Spelling…you either love teaching it or hate it! If you’re like us, you’ve tried countless ways of teaching spelling. You may have felt like you were reaching some students and not others or that your students weren’t gaining functional knowledge of spelling patterns. After lots of trail and error, we finally found a system that works for us and our students. Check out our top tips to make teaching spelling effective!
Tip 1: Work smarter, not harder!
Updating spelling lists and activities weekly can easily become overwhelming. We know we aren’t alone in admitting that we found ourselves dreading this task! That is why we started creating spelling notebooks for our students. At the beginning of each month we put together a spelling notebook for each student including the spelling lists and activities they’ll be doing during word work and literacy centers. This way we only have to prep once a month and all of our students’ work stays together in one spot, saving us time when it is time to correct their work!
Tip 2: Keep things fun!
Spelling can easily become repetitive! We know that a key to student success is student engagement. That means we have to make spelling fun! At the beginning of the year, we slowly introduce and learn how to do 10 different spelling activities. Our goal is to get our students working on them independently. This way, when we begin word work, we can give them the option to choose their own activities. Students love that they get to be in control of how they practice!
Tip 3: Choose your words wisely!
The end goal of teaching spelling is to give our students functional knowledge of spelling patterns and high frequency words. With this in mind, it is important that you choose words that are actually helpful for your students. Choosing commonly used words that they will see when they read and be able to use when they write helps give learning spelling purpose. To write our spelling lists, we divided the most commonly used and spelled words into lists and added in some seasonal words as well to make each week useful for our students.
Spelling Activity Books
We know this is a lot to do by yourself and spelling can easily become overwhelming! So we created Spelling Word & Activity Books for you! These spelling packs come with an entire year’s worth of spelling lists and printable spelling notebooks with activities for your students to choose from! They’re available for both Kindergarten and First Grade and Second Grade and Third Grade. Plus, we’ve recently redone them to make the editable so you can add in your own spelling lists!
If you’re ready to get started, get the first week FREE! Included you’ll get a spelling list and samples of each fun activity. Grab it for Kindergarten and First Grade or Second and Third Grade!
Looking for more teaching tips? Check out these blog posts:
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