Spelfabet

Underlining spellings

When teaching spellings while writing, getting learners to mentally group letters which represent a single sound and think of them as a single “chunk” (grapheme) can be tricky.

One way to focus their attention on a target spelling is by asking learners to underline it, for example:

spout        out       cloud

learn       heard       pearl

fought       brought       bought

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Teaching spelling

In a Grade Prep classroom recently, I wondered why the teacher was getting the children to repeat the following sentence:

“Big elephants can’t always understand small elephants”.

Then I realised she was teaching five-year-olds a mnemonic for the spelling of the word “because”. Big elephants often can’t understand little elephants? Some days in schools, my jaw drops more than others.

Teaching spelling the word “because”

The word “because” only has one sound spelt unusually. The rest of it is perfectly sound-outable, including the “se”, typically used after a vowel digraph, see this list).

The tricky spelling is the “au”, which usually represents the sound “aw” as in “launch” (click here for more words), but in the word “because” represents the sound “o” as in “fault”, “auction”, “sausage” (and some other words, see a list here).

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Spelling collection video

I've just made a three-minute video about my download-and-print Spelling Collection, and put it on my YouTube channel.

It's designed to give learners a framework for organising words by spelling pattern, and thus helps make learning English spelling finite and do-able.

Here it is:

Spelling for kids

English spelling really sucks, but kids still expect adults to be able to explain it. And fair enough.

Here's a 10-point explanation I sometimes find useful:

1. History of English spelling

English spelling sucks because English is a mashup of lots of different languages and their spellings.

First England was invaded by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who spoke old German languages, then by Vikings who spoke Old Norse, and these languages got mixed up with the church's Latin to make Old English. Then in 1066 the Norman French invaded, bringing in lots of French words.

Lots of migration and social upheaval after the Black Death led to a thing called the Great Vowel Shift, when all the vowels moved around. During the Renaissance everyone went mad for Latin and Greek, and started using a lot of their words for new discoveries and inventions. Once the British got Empire-building, they pinched words from all round the world, and now we have the internet, so the madness just continues (if you want to give some examples of English word origins, click here, or watch the Open University's hilarious 10-minute History of English, from which the above image is taken).

A bloke called Samuel Johnson published a dictionary standardising English spelling in 1755, and we've stuck to it pretty well since then, though  American Noah Webster's attempt to simplify spelling actually made things worse, giving us two ways to spell words like "centre/center", "harbo(u)r", "travel(l)ing", "leuk(a)emia", "am(o)eba" and "catalog(ue)".

Simplifying English spelling is now impossible because more than a billion people are using it, and nobody is the boss of it any more, so we just have to suck it up, and teach and learn it well.

2. Spoken words are made of sounds

There are 44 sounds in spoken English – 24 consonant sounds and 20 vowel sounds. Every English word is made of combinations of these sounds.

If you want to know what all the sounds are, click here.

3. Letters are how we draw speech sounds

We can't actually draw sounds, because they are invisible, so someone a long time ago came up with the idea of letters, and we use them to draw the sounds of spoken words.

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Spelling Collection

I’ve just put a Spelling Collection in this website’s shop, which is designed to help learners get their heads around all the different spellings for each English sound. Click here to see a three-minute video about it.

It has one page for most sounds, but two pages for a few sounds – like “k”, “ee” and “aw” – that have quite a lot of different spelling choices.

The idea is that learners write words containing all the different spellings for each sound in the columns in the collection, so that they end up with a booklet that shows them how every sound is spelt.

They can then examine their collection to see which kinds of words contain each spelling, for example the spelling “or” for the sound “er” is generally used after the sound “w”, as in “word”, “work”, “worm” and “worth”.

The Spelling Collection is designed to be used in conjunction with other materials that target one sound at a time and demonstrate each of its spelling alternatives.

For example, I’ve been doing a lot of work on the sound “er” lately.

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Level 8 Workbook

Oh my goodness, I've finally finished my Level 8 workbook, and put it in this website's shop.

I hope it fills what I see as a gap in the market for systematic spelling activities which help learners understand and manage syllable boundaries and vowel spellings in multi-syllable words.

It's my longest workbook yet, with 194 pages, designed for literacy learners who have grasped the basics of vowel spellings in one and two-syllable words but want to build on this, and really get their heads around the main sounds for each major vowel spelling.

There is a brief video tour of this workbook on YouTube – click here to see it.

Spellings covered

The workbook covers the following vowel spellings in multisyllable words: a, a…e, ai, air, ar, are, au, aw, ay, e, e…e, ea, ear, ee, eer, ei, er, ew, i, i…e, ie, igh, ir, o, o…e, oi, oo, or, ou, ow, oy, u, ue, ur, ure, y and y…e (see below for the full list of sound-letter relationships covered).

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Words Their Way

I've been pushing for an early years Synthetic Phonics program at one of the schools I work in, but sadly I'm just a far-too-busy part-time contractor and outsider, who doesn't get to go to the meetings where such things are decided, so I haven't succeeded.

Oh well, I guess it means they'll always generate plenty of work for a Speech Pathologist with literacy expertise (she said, through gritted teeth).

The literacy program they've chosen to use is called Words Their Way, which in the early years essentially puts a layer of initial and analytic phonics over what remains at its core a Whole Language program.

People I know and respect say it is better than the standard "give them a bath in written language and they will magically catch on" Whole Language fare, but its conceptual framework still sees literacy as natural and developmental and a bit mysterious, to be "facilitated" as it "emerges", not an artificial skill to be pulled apart and actively and systematically taught.

"Emergent Spellers"

Words Their Way calls anyone aged one to seven who is writing random marks on paper, drawing pictures, doing "mock linear or letter like writing" or writing random letters and numbers an "Emergent Speller".

Actually, I call someone aged one who is making any sort of recognisable marks on paper a baby genius. Most one-year-olds are more likely to suck the pencil or throw it at you.

On the other hand, anyone in our education system who can only write random letters at age seven is well behind, and probably well aware of this, and highly distressed about it.

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