Our youngest son struggles with spelling. He's finally figured out the b and d, but frequently still writes words with random capital letters. This year has been a struggle. Some of the typical memorization games I designed for our oldest son haven't seemed to improve the outcome of his weekly tests. It just wasn't sticking.
No two kids are alike.
To make it easier, I've been giving him tricks - sometimes visualizations, sometimes jingles, and sometimes a silly sentence. Guess what? Test scores are rising!
Here's a few examples of what we've done the last few weeks.
SPELLING WORD: YOUNG
My son kept leaving the u out of young. I told him to remember: U are young!
SPELLING WORDS: -EA and -EE WORDS
I knew this was going to be a gargantuan challenge. I divided the list. Once I had all the -ee words, I made a sentence for him to remember: "Free wheel for sheep that sneeze between their teeth." To make it more memorable, we sang it. Any other words he's tested that are not in this sentence are -ea words. This trick helped him during our first few nights practicing. Eventually, he didn't have to sing the jingle sentence. He had memorized which words were -ea (beach, eat, teach, reason, etc.) and which were -ee!
SPELLING WORD: BIRTHDAY
Every time my son spelled birthday, he said the second letter was an a. I told him to look at the word. Do you see the birthday candle in the word? YES! This visualization really did the trick (pun intended)!
SPELLING WORD: RAISIN
There's no z in raisin, but try telling that to my son two weeks ago. I told him to remember, "snakes (drawing an s with my hand) like raisins."
SPELLING WORD: FENCES
That c sure sounds like an s, doesn't it? To help my son remember, we came up with the hint: Do you "c" fences?
SPELLING WORD: TRAIN
Sometimes I point out words within words to help my son. When he spelled train initially, he left out the r. I showed him train is really t-rain. BOOM! No more missing letter!
A few hints, a simple song, or a silly sentence have made all the difference for us. I hope some of these tips help you and your kids!
