Spelling Again



Recently, Lucas' spelling marks dropped. From my own analysis, the problem is that I did not ask him to write it down. Instead I just relied on him speaking the letters out loud. Actually, it is pretty silly of me. Whenever I test my students, I always insist that they write down all the answers. They always protest, but I always tell them that it is for their own good. If the test is written, then the retrieval must be in written form. Then I always give the analogy that if all they want to do is to speak the answer, then it would be like a runner just imagining the race instead of really going for practise runs. The irony of it, not following my own advice.

At the same time, I am still not happy with the school's theme-based spelling. After some research, some sources say that theme-based spelling lists must also include the etymology of the word. I am still not convinced. I am not sure that a six-year old really understands what is etymology. By the way, for the non English teaching readers here, etymology means the origins of the word (English is a tremendously confused language - it has borrowed words from Latin, German, French and even Japanese). Well, that is something I will explore in the future.

So, what I am doing now? Firstly, sticking back to my previous advice and get him using all the strategies I mentioned in the previous entry. Secondly, I am also starting on my own spelling programme. I am not happy that he can spell words like 'principal', 'Saudi Arabia', yet cannot spell simple words like 'can'.

As I mentioned before, I believe there are three fundamentals for spelling - phonics, rules and memorisation. Theme based spelling is akin to memorisation because there is no phonetic pattern, no teaching of spelling rules. I also mentioned that many spelling rules are also problematic, because there are many exceptions. The only reliable system is phonics. And what I discovered is that phonics  seems to be somewhat paired with the idea of family groups.

What are family groups? English family groups are groups of words that end with the same sound. For example, the 'an' group consist of words like 'ban', 'can', 'fan', 'man' and so on. As you can imagine, as soon as the child listens to the words and know that the ending is always 'an', the child can decipher the first or first two letters of the word. I tried it on my son, and he could spell 99% of the words after know the family group. It looks promising.

Where can you find some resources for family groups? I think these are the best three (in no particular order):

Enchanted Learning
Spelling Rules (Don't be misled, they have lots of phonics information as well)
Sequential Spelling

Please note that I am not an advocate of any of them. I do not even have their products - I inferred how they teach from their write-ups and sample materials.



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