Learning to spell can be an extremely frustrating experience for many children.  During my ten years of teaching, I have heard many discussions about the most effective way to teach children how to spell.  As with nearly all aspects of teaching a one size fits all approach simply does not work.  Unfortunately the most gifted spellers in a classroom are often not challenged as much as they need to be.

As I result, over the past few years I have given my more gifted spellers ownership over what words they learn to spell.  One way I have done this is by giving them a large list of commonly misspelled words and asked them to research at least five words per week and learn to spell them.  The children have enjoyed the challenge and their spelling has improved as a result.

Here is a list of 600 commonly misspelled words for you to use.

Posted in english, spelling |

Many primary school teachers do some sort of spelling program each week. I have always used a textbook for the basis of my program, however, I constantly trawl books and the internet looking for additional words.

A fantastic resource I found lately is www.morewords.com . Morewords enables you to search thousands of words that begin with, end in or contain certain letter combinations. For example, if you were looking for words that contained ough you would simple type in *ough* into the search function and morewords will give you all the words in its database that contains ough. This resource saves a lot of time when planning your spelling units. I imagine it would be very useful for playing Scrabble!

Posted in programming, spelling |