My headline is in lots of ways misleading for there is no one right way to learn to spell efficiently in English.
In the 60’s and 70’s we made students learn to spell lists of words through repetition or drill with lots of rules thrown in and then in the Donald Graves “Process Writing Era” of the 80’s and early 90’s we moved to what was seen as a more liberal view of spelling where we encouraged children to have a go at words and then got them to learn of few of their errors.
This of course is a massive over generalisation and certainly Donald Graves did not just advocate the “have a go” principle but teachers were often left in the confused state of trying to value everything in the end and students were often left with no clear system in their mind to follow.
Now I think we understand that we learn best when we can make prior connections to our own understandings and get challenged to think and find patterns and anomalies. How does this work for spelling?
Well we have trialled a “Words their Way” approach to spelling and more recently vocabulary over the last few years whereby students engage in a variety of sound, pattern and meaning activities, sorting pictures and words. The approach caters for differentiated learning in the classroom, where children are grouped according to their diagnosed need and use hands on tasks.
This approach is combined with the visual memorization strategy of Look Say Cover Write Check where children choose some of their patterned words from Words their Way combined with a few words from their edited section of their writing (we focus on the 200 most commonly used words first) or from the tier 2 word list work generated in classrooms.
This combined approach when workshopped with students at least twice a week has shown amazing results. We track the progress of our students who have been known to learn at twice the previous rate or more (we used Hattie’s effect size work work to determine improvement rates).
The picture is of two teachers participating in a professional learning workshop after school on the approach.
I share this information to hopefully support teachers in this improvement work. For further information please contact me.
