Every child I know, in every school, comes home with a weekly list of words to learn the spelling of. I did it at school, my son did it at school and I’m sure my future grand-children will too!

But how can you, as parents and carers, support children in learning their list of new words?

It helps to understand how children learn and just as we have different ways of remembering, so do children. What works for one may not work for another.

Try some of these methods:

Visual support: Teaching children to work out whether the word looks right – letter shapes, patterns of word strings. They respond to looking at the words written down.

Auditory learning: Some children like to hear and sound out the words – this identifies different sounds and letters or groups of letters and words by listening to the words spoken out loud.

Kinaesthetic: This links to the child being aware of how they move when writing the words out and gets used to this movement as their hand writes the word on the page. This is where writing and re-writing the word comes in.

Lingusitic: Where you can discuss why a word is written in a certain way. It’s about looking at the rules of spelling and language. eg: i before e except after c.

Hope you find this helpful and look out for some more hints and tips on spelling coming soon on the Kids Learn Fast blog. 

Elisa x