Spellings Why the need to change? Sending home a list of spellings to learn by rote has been widely found to have virtually no impact on children’s ability to spell. Children appear to learn the spellings individually but they haven’t truly embedded that knowledge. They do not apply the spellings in their writing, even in the next lesson, and they make errors if the spellings are tested in a different order from which they learned them. Learning spellings by rote may be sufficient for commonplace (high frequency) words but cannot be the way to learn the 1,000,000 words in the English language.

What’s new? Spelling Rule given every 2/3 weeks Spelling rule explored in class and at home (examples given on website) Children tested on 10 words that follow the rule after 2/3 weeks Scores recorded to identify areas of weakness in children’s spelling knowledge Areas of weakness picked up on and revised

This week’s spelling rule is how the endings of nouns change when they are in the plural. For example, ‘baby’ becomes ‘babies’ and ‘fox’ becomes ‘foxes’ Some words add just an s: Brick – bricks Table – tables If words end in an ‘h’, ‘o’ or ‘x’ they often add ‘es’: Fox – foxes Church – churches Tomato – tomatoes Words that end in a ‘y’ add ‘es’ but change the ‘y’ to an ‘i’: Baby – babies Lady – ladies Fly – flies A few words stay the same : Sheep - sheep

This weeks’ spelling rule is words that have the ending ‘-cious’ or ‘-tious’. Some examples are: Delicious Suspicious Precious Cautious Infectious Nutritious Auspicious A common exception word is: Anxious

What can you do at home? Practise and learn just the spellings on the website like in the past, but get your child to explain the rule to you. Find other words that follow the rule (your child can do this independently or with your support). Finding rhyming words is often helpful. Get your child to practise the letter string (with rules like ‘-cious’ ending) by writing it joined up lots of times. Find words that are exceptions to the rule – is there are reason why they are exceptions? Get your child to write the words in context (i.e as part of a longer sentence). Get your child to check for spellings that follow the rule in that week’s homework, ensuring they’ve spelt them correctly.

FAQs Will my child be tested on words that they haven’t learned? Yes, possibly. But all the words in the test will follow the rule that your child has been practising. It’s revising for a maths test – you may not have learned the answer to that individual sum, but you have learned the method you need to use to answer it. How many words should we be researching/learning at home? There’s no magic amount. Some rules apply to thousands of words, some to just a few. You may find it easy to look at many words one week and hard to find more than a handful the next week. It’s more about how much time your child has spent on spellings in that week (10-15 minutes as a guide) and how well they appear to grasp the rule. Is there any point learning these rules if my child can’t spell simple words correctly?