Spelling It Out

This is a summarised version of a longer article entitled ‘Teach Spelling in Context’ that appears in August’s Primary Teacher Update magazine.
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In a rather significant month in education, the month in which the shiny new Primary Curriculum was wrapped up and delivered to the teaching world, it seems apt to further reflect upon some of the new expectations and, perhaps most importantly, how we are going to most effectively deliver them in the classroom. Grammar, phonics and reading have somewhat stolen the limelight, so we wanted to return to one of the other key areas of the curriculum that has seen significant change: spelling.

When we develop any new teaching sequence, write a piece of training or reflect upon requirements of the curriculum, our starting point is always the text. We are often heard bandying around one of our favourite Literacy Treeisms, that ‘You can’t have Literacy without literature’. When picking up a new text we always try to think about potential grammar, spelling and cross-curricular learning opportunities. When the text is of good quality, those links are usually abundant. It was interesting, for example, when re-looking at the programme of study today and note that one of the books we frequently use, FArTHER by Grahame Baker Smith, fits perfectly with the expectations for learning homophones in Years 3 and 4!

Quality texts support the activation of engagement, give children a strong and tangible sense of immersion and, perhaps most importantly, give children a real, purposeful reason for actually learning those spelling words, rules and patterns. We have talked previously about the importance, therefore, of embedding the acquisition of spelling rules within the context of a day-to-day teaching sequence, underpinned by regular activities that support children’s vocabulary acquisition. This does not mean that spelling cannot be taught discretely, in fact many sessions will have explicit spelling objectives, but in planning in this way it soon becomes evident that spelling objectives, far from sitting at odds with objectives from other strands of Literacy learning (composition and effect, sentence structure and punctuation and text structure and organisation), actually exist at the heart of them. Moreover, they complement children’s ability to attain, acquire and use broad, rich and varied vocabulary.

So, in planning such a sequence, choice of text is paramount and should always be the starting point. Not only is it vital that the chosen book is relevant, interesting and engaging for children, it must also have a good model of high-quality language in which to support both acquisition and spelling. One such text is Anthony Browne’s ‘King Kong’. Not only does it engage with its film-like narrative, adventure, mystery and love-affairs, it also contains Browne’s unmistakable illustration that lends itself to a wealth of discussion and opportunity to infer. Perhaps above all this, it gives us the chance to explore some new and relevant vocabulary.

There are a range of ways to explore spelling and vocabulary through such a text, but in practice it is often more effective to begin with the language tasks and then develop the spelling links that arise.

One such a way is by sorting words into levels of relevance to describe a particular scene or character. Use one of the most powerful scenes in the book, for example where Kong is hanging from the very top of the Empire State Building. Planes are attacking him and bombs are being dropped and he begins to accept his fate. The spelling programme of study states that children should recognise and spell words with the suffix ‘tion’ and its various spelling patterns. Giving children a range of words that end in the ‘tion’ suffix, for example frustration, elation, confrontation, celebration, hesitation, apprehension, tension, anticipation will support them to acquire, use and learn the spelling patterns of the new suffix, rather than learning a list of decontextualised words. The children begin by identifying the way that word classes can be modified by the addition of a suffix, e.g. changing anticipate to anticipation converts a verb into an abstract noun. Next, they order the words depending on their relevance to the scene and sort the words into their different spelling patterns. At this point, children should identify any other words they know that end in the same suffix and whether they can identify the rule. This not only activates dormant vocabulary, but also expose children to new vocabulary they may not have otherwise heard. It supports grammatical learning, as well as language and spelling acquisition. Children go on to use these abstract nouns in their extended written outcomes, identify and apply the correct spelling patterns and nominalise for succinctness (a feature of level 5 writing).

Different children will find success with different spelling strategies, so we need to ensure that our teaching caters for a whole variety of learners, but perhaps most importantly we need to give children the opportunity to discover these rules for themselves, within an stimulating and exciting learning context, where text is central and immersion in rich and varied language is paramount. We need to ensure that there is a clear purpose for learning new spellings, not only for transient success in tests and quizzes, but as a real and very tangible method of learning new vocabulary in order to create interesting texts. So, spelling needn’t be a standalone lesson, or a list of words to be tested, it can sit hand-in-hand with vocabulary, grammar and the teaching of writing itself if we are to ensure that it has the maximum possible impact.

The Literacy Tree will be running a course entitled ‘Building Vocabulary into Spelling’ at Winton Primary School in London on Friday 27th October 2013. Please email info@theliteracytree.co.uk for details and bookings.