Parent Guide to Spelling

How Children Learn to Spell

In order to do well in spelling, a third-grade child must be proficient in these five areas:

• hearing sounds - being able to distinguish the individual sounds that make up words (much = /m/+/u/+/ch/)

• matching sounds to letters and letter combinations - knowing the basic vowel and consonant sounds as well as other combinations (ch, sh, oi, aw)

• pattern recognition - understanding and noticing the ways that letter combinations repeat over and over (house, mouse, blouse)

• meaning - recognizing meaningful prefixes (prehistoric), suffixes (heartless), and roots (photosynthesis)

• memory - recalling the spellings of common words quickly and easily (essential for tricky words like people, sure, once)

When a child goes to spell a word, they first activate their memory. If they think they remember the word, they spell from memory. If they don't, they spell what they hear according to their knowledge of letter sounds and spelling patterns.

Here are some spellings for the word telephone:

tlfn - only hears consonants

telufon - hears all sounds but does not know the silent e combination

telufone - does not remember the /ph/ digraph

telaphone, teluphone, teliphone - does not know the prefix tele

telephone - either has memorized word or knows the root tele means far as in television and telescope

Helping Your Child with Spelling

The key to helping your child with spelling is knowing when and how often you should ask your child to correct their misspellings. If a parent ignores all of their child's spelling errors, their child will not develop their understanding of spelling patterns and will tend to see spelling as unimportant and not worth the effort to do well. If a parent forces the child to correct all of their spelling errors, the child will become overly dependent on the parent, see spelling as a chore, be overloaded with more spelling combinations than they are ready to absorb, and become a hesitant writer. So here is what you should do: only ask your child to correct a misspelled word if your child has already studied that word, has already studied the spelling pattern that goes with that word, or can plainly see the word right in front of them on a book or writing assignment. Before you tell your child the correct spelling, give them clues and guide them to come up with the correct spelling from what they know.

Approximate Sequence of Word Study for Elementary Students

The following sequence is a rough guide to the spelling patterns that students master during their elementary school years. Children vary greatly and so not every child's skills will correspond with the breakdowns below.

Kindergarten and 1st Grade

• consonant sounds

• short vowels like short a in cat

First Grade and Second Grade

• digraphs - two letters that make one sound (ch, sh, th)

• blends - consonant combinations where you can hear each consonant (bl, st, fr)

• r controlled vowels (ar, er, or)

• silent e rule for long vowels like in cake

Second Grade and Third Grade

• other long vowel combinations like ai in rain, oa in boat, ea in meat

• more r controlled vowels (air, eer, oar)

• non-long-vowel combinations like oi in coin, aw in crawl, ow in crown

Third Grade and Fourth Grade

• complex consonants (shr, tch, dge)

• plural endings (washes, cries)

• past tense endings (washed, cried)

Fourth Grade and Fifth Grade

• multi-syllable words

• doubled consonants (button, robber)

• simple prefixes, suffixes, and roots

Fifth Grade and Up

• further multi-syllable words

• unaccented syllables

• further prefixes, suffixes, and roots