Tuesday Tip - Say Goodbye to Memorisation Strategies for Spelling

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss that instead of teaching memorising words by letter names, teach kids to think about word construction.

Video Transcript

When we want to remember how to spell words, it's a common thing to try and remember how the word is spelled using letter names. That sometimes is really helpful, I still remember because as B E C A U S E. However, it is a much more productive way to think about words when we think about how they're constructed with orthography and morphology, with the spelling rules and the meaningful parts.

So say a child's trying to remember whether the word lazy has an E. Now you could say to them, Oh, it's just L A Z Y, and they could repeat you and write it in a way they go. Or you could help them understand that the word lazy is part of a word family that all have the same base word, laze. The decision about whether lazy has an E or not comes about when we think about the suffixing convention, adding a vowel suffix to a word ending in E, we drop the E and add the suffix.

So this might seem like it will take a long time, but if you're doing this all of the time and explicitly teaching about these suffixing conventions, simple words such as lazy, will be much easier to spell. So next time you're trying to think about how to actually spell this word, think about how it's constructed, not just the string of letters that make it up.

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