Teaching Spelling in the New Curriculum

Aims of the workshop To explain the teaching of spelling across the school. To explore techniques in teaching spelling rules, conventions and strategies. To explain our whole school approach to assessing spelling.

Our Approach As a school, we work in partnership with local authority advisers and we are constantly reviewing what we do and the impact of our work. We have had numerous discussions as a senior leadership team and with staff to evaluate how we can have the most significant impact when teaching spelling across the school.

Effective Teaching of Spelling There is no evidence to support that giving children weekly spelling lists improves spelling in the long term. Our experience is it has had little impact on raising pupil attainment. Children do not retain spellings lists in their long term memory, particularly when applying in other work. As a school, we have tried a number of approaches over the years.

Spelling Tests Limitations: Written work does not reflect spelling test results; Children become passive learners, receiving delivered knowledge and are not actively involved in the learning process; The teaching of spelling is removed from the process of writing and is taught as a discrete skill.

The Teaching of Spelling at CWPS Spellings need to be explicitly taught; Rules and patterns should be investigated using a multi-sensory approach. This enables pupils to retain spelling rules and patterns that can be applied in their independent work and across the curriculum.

Benefits of Investigations They appeal to problem-solving instincts Children have to be more active in deconstructing words They develop self-help strategies An interesting way to learn They aid memory They are more likely to lead to children applying correct spellings to their work than learning lists.

Spelling Cycle Introduce a set of relevant words Teach the spelling rule by ‘playing with words’ Apply the spelling rule in sentences and paragraphs Practise the spelling rule through games, crosswords etc Assess the spelling rule through dictated sentences Consolidate through a range of self-selected activities set for homework

Teaching Spelling in session 1 Tell the children the objective/strategy Introduce a set of relevant words Children to sort words and identify patterns Help children to hypothesise and test their ideas Explain the principle behind the pattern Practise the convention Explore and extend - exceptions, variations

‘tial’ or ‘cial’? residential consequential spatial insubstantial circumstantial evidential financial sacrificial prejudicial commercial beneficial artificial financial

Strategies Roots Syllables and Phonemes Analogy Handwriting Mnemonics

Look and ‘Learn’ annihilate bildungsroman definitely separately

Investigate and learn an nihil ate bil dungs roman de finite ly separately

Session Two - Apply Independent– Short session: Independent– Short session: Teachers ask children to use spelling words/rule in context by creating sentences/paragraphs of writing. Children underline the spelling words in red.

Session Three – Practise Independent : Independent : Ask children to practise the spelling rule through a range of Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic (VAK) games. Plenary: Plenary: Quick-fire whiteboard assessment.

Session Four – Assessment Whole class – ‘Spelling Jar’ Practise and assess words used in the whole unit through dictated sentences that contain the words from the unit and previously taught conventions.

Consolidate - Homework Practise Spellings at Home Children can choose an activity to complete from the document provided to practise the spelling rule.

Spelling Journals We use spelling journals to: List words under current investigation that children find tricky List misspelt words in writing that are corrected (A-Z spelling log) Highlight misspelt high frequency words in written work Record ALL spelling work and investigations

Monitoring and Review As with everything we undertake at CWPS we have a very rigorous programme for monitoring and reviewing our practice. This will include: book monitoring, pupil and staff voice and pupil outcomes.