A massive part of being a confident writer is being able to automatically spell the most frequently occurring words you regularly need. Just 300 words which make up half of everything we read and write, so these are worth your child’s time and something worth testing.
1) Put the words up around the house
Get your child to write them big, decorate them and put them up. Positioning them on a particular linked object might help them visualise them when they need to recall the spelling (e.g. positioning ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ on a wedding photo)
2) Mystery Word Town app.
This is a cute little, low-cost spelling app. which appeals to all ages (unless you’ve got a very stroppy twelve year old – nothing appeals to them). They can play with the preset words or play with their own words. I would recommend adding the ten words they are learning to their personalised word list, then add each consecutive ten, so they recap all the words they’ve learned in previous weeks.
3) Make them into a free word search (in under two mins)
This visual approach is particularly effective for ‘sight words’ which need to be learned by sight because they don’t follow any of the rules (e.g. because, Mrs). I love this website because it’s simple, free and you can choose options like size of puzzle, size of font, lowercase letters (which is how they would read and write the words) and forwards only (which helps with eye tracking, rather than up/down/backwards/diagonally).
4) Hairy Words 1 and 2 apps
Another great, low-cost spelling app. which is widely available. This has all the high-frequency words preloaded on it. They choose the word, it flashes it up and then they try to spell it. The best bit is the genuinely fun reward game, which adjusts to their skill level. Here is my review of it.
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