Is there a ‘best way’ to teach children how to spell?
While there is no one way to teach children how to spell, children need to develop certain skills to become good spellers. While these skills develop naturally and easily for some children, others need a lot of explicit teaching and practice. The following are pre-requisites for good spelling: 1. Speech Children need to be able to pronounce correctly the word they want to write down 2. Phonemic awareness Children need to be able to distinguish the sequence of individual sounds in spoken words. This is called phonemic awareness. 3. Knowledge of the alphabet Children need to know the sounds of the letters of the alphabet and to be able to form the letters correctly. Letter-sound matching needs to be automatic to be able to spell words. 4. Visual memory Children need to be able to remember visual patterns so that they can spell words by analogy. They also need to be able to remember the ‘look’ of irregular words. My child is in Reception. She is having a lot of difficulty learning to spel
