[blparent] spelling ideas
dawn stumpner
dawn205120 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 3 17:15:00 UTC 2014
Yes, I think Judy's idea about finding words with the same
pattern is great. Start with easy stuff that rhymes and just
replace one letter at a time. Kind of like on Electric Company,
if you've ever seen the part where they have part of a word
coming out of one person's mouth and part out of the other, and
they pronounce the sounds and put them together to make
similar-sounding words: c ...' an ...'' can. f ...' an ...' fan.
etc. etc. The idea about doing a somersault while spelling is
great too, because especially with young kids, the more physical
or engaging an activity is, the more chance there is of putting
it into long-term memory. She could try yelling the letters,
whispering the letters, jumping rope to the letters, hopping to
them, bunny-hopping to them, clapping, etc. Maybe you could use
refrigerator magnet letters or braille Scrabble letters to play
making short sound-alike words. To get used to sounds, you could
play finding things that have a certain sound in them when you're
out walking or in the house, like "I spy." If you want to
practice remembering that a often has a sound like in "Dan," you
could give some examples, and then she could point out things she
sees with this sound on walks like a can, a man, an ant, etc.
The less stress she has "working" on spelling and the more like
play it is, the more she'll stick with it and remember stuff, so
it would be great if the teacher is onboard too and isn't sending
too many words that are different. However, I know that a lot of
teachers in early grades want kids to remember spellings of
short, common "sight" words that occur frequently in reading like
"the," "in," "that," etc. These are useful ones for kids to know
so they don't stop and try to sound out weird words like "the"
that don't sound like they look, but you can talk with the
teacher about your ideas and come up with a plan together.
She'll get it!
Dawn
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