Author: User

Assessment
Children are no longer assessed purely on the basis of a single word spelling test. Teachers can make judgements about a child’s ability to spell words by placing them in a context e.g. a dictated sentence/paragraph.
At Home
If your child brings a common word list home, it is helpful to discuss different strategies, which could be used to help with the spelling of these words.
You could also play games with words by seeing who can make the most words from a root word e.g. help, helpful, unhelpful, helpfully, helpless, helplessly. You could discuss how each word differs in meaning.

Active Literacy
A Guide for Parents
Stage 6 & 7
Spelling

Introduction
The aim of this leaflet is to provide you with information about how your child is taught spelling at school and to give you information to allow you to support your child at home.
In Class
Children are taught spelling in 2 main ways at stage 6 and 7. They are taught common words appropriate to their stage, interdisciplinary learning, writing genre features or current school events. Spelling strategies and spelling rules continue to be the focus for teaching these types of words. Children will work with partners to problem solve how they can remember the spelling of these words.
Spelling Strategies
The strategies the children are taught are:
Using Phoneme Knowledge (sounding out)
Syllabification – breaking words down into syllables. The children can clap out words to identify syllables e.g. go-ing/An-drew
Word Shape – Look at letter shape, size, ascending and descending letters.
Tricky Letters – Looking at the position of tricky letters as an aid to spelling.
Compound Words – Breaking the compound word into simple words e.g. into makes in and to.
Mnemonic – using an aide memoire e.g. because – Big Elephants Can Add Up Sums Easily
Using Analogy – If you know how to spell one word you can spell similar words e.g. if you can spell hill, you can spell mill, will, fill etc.

Diacritical Marking
Diacritical marking, learned in stages 4 & 5 may still be used to help recognise the phonemes in a word.
Single sounds/phonemes are marked with dot under the sound
Joined phonemes are marked by underlining Split phonemes are marked with a joining loop
Elkonin Boxes
Elkonin boxes can be used to break down words
into sounds.
Word Building
The second part of the spelling programme is looking at word building. Children are taught about affixes (beginnings and endings we can add to words to change their meaning) and root words and their meanings. In this way children can understand the grammatical elements of word building and deepen their understanding of words by investigating root words, adding appropriate prefixes and suffixes, and understanding how these affect the meaning of a word.
Root word Meaning Prefix New word New Meaning
consider to think about re (again) reconsider think about again
Root word Suffix New word New Meaning
consider ate (state of) considerate showing thought
As well as affixes children are taught about homophones and confusions. Words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings are called homophones e.g. ate and eight. Words that can sound or are spelled similarly and are often mixed up are called confusions e.g. affect and effect.