Posted on: 15/05/2019
It is a usual Monday morning at school. I am charging around the corridors getting resources ready for the day ahead - the ever-too-short weekend already a distant memory.
It is always on a Monday morning – at 08:30 GMT approximately – that the photocopier, like the teachers, over-worked and irritable from the heavy demands of term, starts to jam, refuses to pick up the paper and rejects any instruction. And, like soldiers on the frontline, we speedily reload the Cannon ink cartridges and frantically jab at its buttons until the next ream of resources are spewed out. If the children knew the colourful language directed at the photocopier in the PPA room around this time of the day, they would gasp (and probably take swift note – oh if only children would absorb abstract nouns as easily as they do curse words).
By 14:45, things have settled down, children are busying away on their fourth or fifth lesson of the day and, with the end in sight, I feel relieved that the whirlwind of another Monday has been successfully navigated. At this point, just as I’m bordering on feeling smug, a colleague asks, “Has anyone got spelling homework ready?” More internal cursing ensues.
After a few years on the job, I started to have the uneasy feeling, and rightly so, that we weren’t doing the spelling curriculum justice (even on the better-organised Mondays). We would give out the spelling words, dutifully taken from the wordlists at the start of the week and there would be a test, through dictation, on a Friday.
Children were encouraged to use the ‘Look, Cover, Write, Check’ strategy every night at home. However, in all honestly, many of the children didn’t use this strategy at all (supplementing regular revision with Thursday cramming) and even for the most diligent of children, the words learned were rarely transferred into their writing or the spellings into their long-term memory. A vital piece of the puzzle was obviously missing and for children who routinely did not do well in the tests, their sense of failure was compounded.
The 2014 Curriculum has posed many challenges for teachers and one of the most pressing is ensuring the breadth of coverage in spelling and vocabulary acquisition. There are over a hundred words in each wordlist and multiple spelling rules to be taught. How do we ensure these are all taught in meaningful and creative ways? Add to this the fact that many children start school ‘word poor’, that this vocabulary deficit can dramatically widen as children develop, and the task seems unsurmountable.
Nevertheless, it is aconcern that should be at the very heart of what teachers do, after all every subject has its own rich plethora of words and spellings to be learnt. A forest of words to be explored. We have to explicitly teach vocabulary and testing alone is not teaching. Alex Quigley in his book, Closing the Vocabulary Gap (2018), emphasises this point:
By closing the vocabulary gap for children in our classrooms with their peers, we can offer them the vital academic tools for school success, alongside the capability to communicate with confidence in the world beyond the school gate.
Whilst looking up definitions in a dictionary or synonyms in a thesaurus is an important skill, it is simply not enough to help children understand the nuances of meaning, the appropriate contexts and the underlying structure and history of a word.
This is particularly pertinent in relation to Tier 2 vocabulary. As Isabel Beck outlined in her book Bringing Words to Life, Tier 2 are words which are frequently used have more shades of meaning than Tier 1 words e.g. benevolent as opposed to kind; distraught as opposed to sad.
I have a memory of a boy in my Y5 class who wrote the sentence: The girl was refrigerated to the spot. When explaining his choice, he said he used the longest synonym for frozen he could find assuming that I would find this the most impressive. And there lies our problem.
Approaching Spelling and Vocabulary Acquisition hand in hand
Quigley argues that we must move beyond the spelling by roteapproach and towards a spelling by reason approach, teaching children the etymology and morphology of a word and allowing them to see these words used in multiple and relatable contexts.
Spelling Seeds is a collection of activities and exercises, drawn from our years of experience as teachers, creating a comprehensive spelling by reason approach. All aspects of this tool are designed to work with our quality texts, alongside existing planning sequences, helping teachers incorporate spelling into everyday lessons.
Let’s imagine that we are teaching using the classic Ted Hughes’ text The Iron Man. We could begin with an investigation, where, to decipher the message of a radio transmission the children must unjumble keys words. Or, for Anthony Brown’s King Kong they could investigate words by finding them embedded in an advertisement for an acting agency.
By using books that are already part of the Literary Curriculum we can provide the opportunity for the children to investigate the words in context.
We follow these investigations with an opportunity to practice the vocabulary. Games are an ideal vehicle as are mnemonics devices for remembering the trickier spellings. Familiar foes such as necessary or dessert can be tackled with the handy hooks one collar, two sleeves or two ss’s are something sweet. This is most effective if children come up with their own version of these, understanding and breaking down the vocabulary to fit with their own memories and associations.
Once they have these pieces in place, they have some of the essential building blocks to apply in writing. Application is a chance for them to embed the vocabulary in a written outcome, for example, a diary entry, character description or persuasive letter. Furthermore, the Spelling Seedslook to see where vocabulary can be applied across the curriculum and suggest ways to enliven spelling homework.
In fact, we have set out to enliven the whole approach to spelling for teachers and children, moving away from test based learning and a paint by numbers format. By planting these seeds, we can provide the foundations for a rich forest of words to grow in children’s writing.
@literacydonny
Posted in: Curriculum
