Word investigations are the ultimate Inquiry-based way of teaching spelling. They involve students finding words in their books and around the classroom, getting up and moving, working independently or in small groups. You can then bring the whole class together to share and discuss.
You can run a word investigation in a number of ways. You could:
Whatever investigation you run, students will be up and getting excited about spelling. They figure out and discover things for themselves, there is no teacher standing up the front spouting out spelling rules that are never remembered. Word investigations make spelling meaningful. |
Rounding Up The Rhymes is a fun activity that works in both the middle and upper years. It focuses on rhyming words to begin with then delves into onset and rime.
To teach it choose a book, story or poem with LOTS of rhyming words. Read what you chose beforehand and choose what word blend you wish to focus on (read: which rhyme). Read it then to the students, purely for enjoyment. Read it again (you don't need to read the whole book, maybe just a page or two) but this time while wearing bunny ears, as a bit of a visual cue to let students know that they really need to listen. This time students raise their hands when they hear a rhyming word and you write it up on an anchor chart. Once you have around fifteen words on your chart, have students identify those that have the same ending. Cross out any that don't (you'll have around three different ending groups). Pick the one you chose earlier and have students brainstorm (either whole class or small groups) all the words they can think of with that ending (for example -at: cat, mat, sat, flat, splat etc.) As an extension, students can look at the onset and rime of the chosen word. With the word cat, the onset is the c while the rime is the at. |
Word hunts (also called word searches) are a fun way to get kids recognising familiar letter patterns. They are great for short, ten minute word study sessions. You can even make your own!
I made the word hunt below using A-Z Teacher Tools. Have a go at making your own, or even have a go at finding all the words in mine! Have students work in pairs or individually to race against the clock to find all the words. The best part about word hunts is that you can put whatever words your class is focusing on in there and make them as easy or as difficult as you like.
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Mnemonic devices, or memory tricks, give students a little extra help at spelling a word. By focusing on the most significant part of a word, these devices will assist you in spelling a word. Keep a Mnemonic Memory Book in your classroom and fill it with the words and tricks as students come across them. Students can refer back to the book when they are stuck. I've made a few pages to get you started, you can find them in the downloads section.
Get your students involved with the book! In small groups, have students create a memory trick for a class focus word. Each group presents their suggestion to the class and the class can decide if the word should be included in the book. The book is useful for any year level: lower; middle; or upper. Just change the words you put in there to suit your class. |
The writing process is the process that students go through when creating a piece of writing: from pre-writing to publishing. You can find a free poster set in the downloads section.
Proofreading and Editing are the two sections where spelling and vocabulary really come into play. In order for students to be able to focus on developing ideas and just getting them down, I tend to ignore spelling till these two sections. It's in these that students have the opportunity to go through their work, get others to read it and fix up any misspelled words. I have three different coloured pens in my classroom: black, green and purple. The black is for draft writing, the green is for adding new ideas and the purple is for working out spelling. It makes their work very visual. Visual strategies are really important in these sections, students learn to recognise that they have misspelled a word and develop strategies to help them change it. This tends to be an individual activity but you do have the option of incorporating some focus groups or peer work in as well. |
Now that you've got some idea about the sort of lessons you could do, have a look at some really wonderful and useful books you could focus on in your classroom.