Teaching Spellings at KS2 - IslingtonCS

Teaching

Spellings at KS2

Natalie Derry: Senior Teaching and Learning Consultant: English

21st May 2020

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• To understand where spelling fits in the curriculum

• To develop phonic knowledge to support spelling in KS2

Discussion

How do you teach spelling in KS2

Is there a systematic approach?

How often do you explicitly teach spelling?Do you use a range of strategies?

Can children?

For example, do they:

- ‘Have a go’ at spelling unfamiliar words?- Make use of dictionaries or word banks?

- Use their phonic knowledge?- Make links to other words they know?

Aims of the curriculum

• Effective, fluent and imaginative writers by Y6

• Fluent and automatic spelling and handwriting is an essential step towards this

• Good spellers channel energy into crafting effective sentences which have an impact on the reader because they spend less time and energy thinking about secretarial skills of spelling

• Automatic, fluent spelling enables pupils to focus on higher order skills of selecting apt and imaginative vocabulary for precision and impact

What do good spellers

do?

By the end of Year 2, learners are expected to:

-use spelling strategies such as segmenting, simple roots and suffixes, e.g. ing, ed

-use knowledge of syllables to spell polysyllabic words

-use a dictionary

-spell high-frequency words correctly

By the end of Year 6, learners are expected to:

-use strategies to spell correctly polysyllabic, complex and irregular words

Good spellers…•apply knowledge they have been taught when writing independently•use the resources available•refer to the learning environment•use personal strategies to help them work out a solution to words they don’t know•have curiosity about language and words•take responsibility for their own learningGood spellers are not…•people who learn ten spellings for a test the following week.

Around 70% of the KS2 spelling test rules were first introduced

in years 3 and 4 with the remaining 30% focused on years

5 and 6.

Explicit teaching of spelling in years 3 and 4 is essential, as

well as good phonics and spelling teaching within EYFS

and KS1.

Year 6 objectives 8 16%

Year 5 objectives 12 24%

Year 4 objectives 12 24%

Year 3 objectives 5 10%

Year 2 objectives 12 24%

Year 1 objectives 1 .02%

2019 Spelling

Enough 3/4 Thoughtful (thought) 3/4 Accidentally 3/4

Muscle 5/6 Curiously (curiosity) 5/6

Excellent 5/6

Most of the KS2 Spelling expectations are taught in Year 6? Agree or Disagree?

What does the research say?

• Teaching children strategies for correcting spelling is far more important than giving them the correct spelling of a word

• Spelling Strategies and major spelling patterns are taught much more effectively through lessons than through workbooks or spelling tests

• If children learn spellings for tests and don’t use those words in their own writing, they will forget them within days

• Individualised spelling dictionaries are useful as children are trying to get a grasp of new spellings

• Children often get key rules wrong. The top 12 misspelt words were the same for the 7-10 age group as for children aged 11-14.

• There’s a need for both schools and parents to spend more time on the basics.

These concepts are important for understanding English spelling, and for

teaching and learning:

•Phonics: sounds and the letters that represent them

•Orthography: the coding system of English

•Morphology: the structure and meaning of words

•Etymology: history and origin of words

Some children at Key Stage 2 may be experiencing difficulty in reading and/or writing because they have missed or misunderstood a crucial phase of systematic phonics teaching.

In their day-to-day learning some children may:

• experience difficulties with blending for reading and segmenting for spelling

• show confusion with certain graphemes and related phonemes

• have difficulty segmenting longer words containing adjacent consonants

• demonstrate a general insecurity with long vowel phonemes. For example, children generally know the most common representation of a phoneme, for example /ai/ as in train, but require more explanation and practice about the alternative spellings for any particular phoneme.

Spelling Difficulties

Building on Phonics

When the English tongue we speak.

Why is break not rhymed with

freak?

Will you tell me why it's true

We say sew but likewise few?

And the maker of the verse,

Cannot rhyme his horse with

worse?

Beard is not the same as heard

Cord is different from word.

Cow is cow but low is low

Shoe is never rhymed with foe.

Think of hose, dose, and lose

And think of goose and yet with

choose

Think of comb, tomb and bomb,

Doll and roll or home and some.

Since pay is rhymed with say

Why not paid with said I pray?

Think of blood, food and good.

Mould is not pronounced like

could.

Wherefore done, but gone and

lone - Is there any reason

known?

To sum up all, it seems to me

Sound and letters don't agree.

What methods did you use?

How did you decide which graphemes to select?

What previous knowledge did you draw on?

Chunking

Words within words

Comparison with known

spellings

Sounding out

Known spelling

rules/patterns

Just looks right/wrong

Mnemonic or memory strategy

Do you recognise

these? Why are they

helpful?

What about a phonics

progression? Are you

familiar with this?

In Year Two…

In Year Three…

Miss… I am stuck. How do you spell snail?

Miss… I am stuck. How do you spell snail?

Use your segmenting fingers or draw a phoneme box.

Have a look at the grapheme chart for all

the ways you could record the ay sound. Which looks right?

S-N-A-I-L

In the earlier stages of spelling development children rely heavily

on phonetic approaches to spelling words. When children spell

phonetically they go through the following process:

• Orally segment a word by identifying all of the phonemes

through that spoken word

• Select the appropriate graphemes to represent each of the

phonemes in the word

In order to do this effectively they need a good knowledge of the

English alphabetic code.

Phonics for Spelling

Phoneme

Grapheme

Digraph

Trigraph

CVC Word

segment

blend

Adjacent consonant

PhonemeA phoneme is the smallest unit of sound. There are around 44 phonemes in English; the exact number depends on regional accents. A single phoneme may be represented in writing by one, two, three or four letters constituting a single grapheme.

GraphemeA letter, or combination of letters, that corresponds to a single phoneme within a word.

What is GPCs?

The National Curriculum states that Phonic knowledge should continue to underpin

spelling after key stage 1; teachers should still draw pupils’ attention to GPCs that do

and do not fit in with what has been taught so far.

The links between letters, or combinations of letters (graphemes) and the speech sounds (phonemes) that they represent. In the English writing system, graphemes may correspond to different phonemes in different words.

Some Definitions

A Phoneme

This is the smallest unit of sound in a word.

How many phonemes can you hear in

cat?

A grapheme

These are the letters that represent the

phoneme.

The grapheme could be 1 letter, 2 letters or more! We often refer to these as sound buttons:

t ai igh

Children need to practise recognising the grapheme and saying the phoneme that it represents.

The National Curriculum states that Phonic knowledge should continue to underpin

spelling after key stage 1; teachers should still draw pupils’ attention to GPCs that do

and do not fit in with what has been taught so far.

DigraphA type of grapheme where two letters represent one phoneme. Sometimes, these two letters are not next to one another; this is called a split digraph.

TrigraphA type of grapheme where three letters represent one phoneme.

Do all of these words have a trigraph?

Hair night fire

Consonant digraph: Sh, th

Vowel Digraph:Ay, ee

Split Digraph:A-e, i-e

The National Curriculum states that Phonic knowledge should continue to underpin

spelling after key stage 1; teachers should still draw pupils’ attention to GPCs that do

and do not fit in with what has been taught so far.

CVC WordThe abbreviations used for consonant-vowel-consonant used to describe the order of sounds.

Write down 5 CVC words

Do they all have 3 letters?

Is Car a CVC word?

What about sheep?

*

Adjacent consonant

Two (or three) letters making two (or three) sounds. E.g. the first three letters of strap are adjacent consonants. Previously known as a consonant cluster.

The National Curriculum states that Phonic knowledge should continue to underpin

spelling after key stage 1; teachers should still draw pupils’ attention to GPCs that do

and do not fit in with what has been taught so far.

segmentblend

The process of using phonics for reading. Children identify and

synthesise/blend the phonemes in order to make a word. E.g. s-n-a-p,

blended together, reads snap.

The process of using phonics for writing. Children listen to the

whole word and break it down into the constituent phonemes,

choosing an appropriate grapheme to represent each phoneme. E.g. ship can be

segmented as sh-i-p.

Short or simple sound

digraph

Trigraph

Split-digraph

How might sound buttons support spelling?

blend

Oral Segmenting

• We only need letter names in spelling to relay a correct spelling from one person to another – letter by letter. The skill of oral segmenting for spelling (starting with syllable chunking in multi-syllable words) should continue in KS2 – including making it explicit that this spelling skill is an adult skill, not just ‘baby stuff’.

• This understanding is for children’s intellectual development and self esteem – especially important for those receiving a phonics intervention beyond the main class.

• Segmenting words into phonemes and selecting the correct graphemes

• Segmenting words into syllables

Segmenting

WORD PHONEMES

shelf

dress

think

string

sprint

flick

SegmentingWORD PHONEMES

shelf sh e l f

dress d r e ss

think th i n k

string s t r i ng

sprint s p r i n t

flick f l i ck

Phoneme Frames

Say the sounds and move

the counters for cat.

Say the sounds and

move the letters for cat.

Say the sounds and write

the letters for cat.

How might phoneme frames support spelling?

The use of phoneme fingers should be incorporated in lessons to support

segmentation. This may be to support tricky parts of words or these could become syllable fingers and then

broken down.

Syllables

Use Spelling Voice: Clear and Crisp,

over pronounce

Snip into syllables: say and tap each

syllable clearly, draw syllable

separators

Say and write sounds: say sounds

and draw buttons, say sound sand

write spellings, repeat for each

syllable

Difficult

Di ffi cult

D i

D i f f i c u l t

Distinguish ‘The Alphabetic Code’from ‘The Alphabet’ – provide both!

Same code for all.Make the code tangible.

If children are not

consistently using

‘pure sounds’ what

will be the impact

in KS2?

Teachers should continue to emphasise to pupils the

relationships between sounds and letters, even when the

relationships are unusual. Once root words are learnt in this way,

longer words can be spelt correctly, if the rules and

guidance for adding prefixes and suffixes are also known.

Complex Sounds Chart

• A very useful teaching aid is an alphabetic code chart that shows sounds, or phonemes, down the columns and the many spelling alternatives for the sounds (graphemes) embedded in word examples across the rows.

• This helps to highlight just how complex English’s spelling system is and provides a permanent visual reference for use within spelling lessons for KS2 and for supporting application of phonics for spelling/writing in the wider curriculum.

• Following oral segmenting (identification of the sounds from beginning to end of spoken words), teachers and learners can discuss which spelling alternatives are required for specific words, with reference to the chart.

Pronunciation guide

What do you notice about

these words?

Earwer

Eigheig

Look at the word

list, how could you

use phonic

knowledge and

segmenting to

support children

with spelling

these words?

• Revise, teach,

practise,

apply/assess

structure

• Use of displays and

working walls

• Mini white boards to

assess and address

misconceptions

quickly, ‘Show me’

• TTYP

• Multi-sensory games

• Teacher Modelling

• Investigations

What would you

expect to see

from an

outstanding

phonics lesson at

KS1?

Working Wall

Route to spelling

1. Say the word

2. Do I know how to spell it already

3. Which parts of the word can I spell already?

4. What is the tricky phoneme?

5. What do I know about the phoneme?

6. What is my best guess

7. Does it look right?

Stop their brains bypassing spelling by directly addressing it, prompting them to think critically about it e.g. “Find me

a word you know you’ve got right/wrong/you’re unsure about.”

You have made some spelling errors here. Can you re-read this sentence and underline the words you are not

sure about.

Write each spelling out three times.

time there

girl

time there

girl

Which spelling needs to be learned through memory?

Read these versions. Which do you think looks like it does in book? Circle

it. How could you remember it?

Draw the sound buttons on the words underlined. Which is the tricky part?

Use the sound chart to use an alternative grapheme.

Which one looks right?

Use the grapheme chart to try a

different grapheme for the ur. Write it in the phoneme

box.

Model it!!!

Does it look

right?

Have I seen it

look like that in

a book?

Teaching or Testing?

AssessmentPupils’ learning should be assessed throughout the sequence of lessons. The ‘Apply’ part of the sequence should regularly include assessment activities to identify if pupils have learnt the key concept taught.

These activities include:

• Testing – by teacher and peers • Dictation • Explaining • Independent application in writing • Frequent learning and testing of statutory and personal words.

Spelling journals can take many forms and are much more than just a word book.

Spelling journals can be used for:

• practising strategies

• learning words

• recording rules/conventions/generalisations as an aide-memoire

• word lists of really tricky words (spelling enemies)

• ‘Having a go’ at the point of writing

• ongoing record of statutory words learnt

• investigations

• recording spelling targets or goals

• spelling tests.

Sending Spellings HomeConsider:

• limiting the number of words to five or less a week to ensure success and enable

deeper learning

• make sure pupils and parents have access to the range of learning strategies which

have been taught in school, to use in home learning

• assess spellings in context, for example: learning spellings in a given sentence,

generating sentences for each word, assessing through unseen dictated sentences

• keep an ongoing record of words learnt and set very high expectations of correct

application in writing once a word has been learned.

Spelling Error Analysis

The Pupil can…• spell correctly most words from the year 5 / year 6

spelling list,* and use a dictionary to check the spelling of uncommon or more ambitious vocabulary

Teach the Year 3/4 words before the Year 5/6 as these are the ones the

pupils use most in their writing.

Model how to spell when modelling writing.

“What spelling rule do I need to remember? What could I do to try to spell

this word? Where could I get help?” etc.

Remember too that pupils should be using dictionaries and thesauruses in

order to help them to use and spell more ambitious vocabulary choices.

How are you currently using these? Are you modelling them enough?

Write Race

Pictures around words

Shapes around words

Words without vowels

Pyramid Words

Summary

• Support children to build on what they already know-Phonics!

• Use an error grid to identify the main difficulties• Consider how you are testing spellings• Ensure explicit teaching of spellings.