How To Help Your Child Learn To Spell Correctly

How can I help my child learn to spell correctly?

Spelling is one of those hard things. Some kids are good spellers, some kids are bad spellers. This is part of it; they should read a lot. I can't emphasise how important it is for kids to read; for their comprehension, for their vocabulary, and also for their spelling. The more often you see a word spelled correctly, the more likely you are to spell it correctly. The other thing, and I'm going to hit up a little on some opposition here, is that some people believe in really natural spelling; just let kids spell however it comes out. I believe that if you practice spelling something wrong over and over and over again, it's just going to implant that wrong spelling in your head, so I think we go over spelling with kids. We let them write and get it on the paper and then we go over it with them, we try to explain to them which words are spelled wrong and why, and we try to give them tips to remember how to spell them. We do keep on them and we keep reminding them so that hopefully it will stick. We have spell-check nowadays, so no one needs to be a great speller, but we need to be competent spellers, and I think we want to encourage kids to become that. One thing I really do is, "Just sound it out. Let me hear; sound that out for me. Try to speak it really clearly and sound out the vowels." A lot of kids skip vowels; they just write all consonants, so you want to kind of force them to sound out the vowels. We struggle a ton with 'there', 'their', and 'there', and 'Your' and 'you're'. I just go over it every time; the kids must think I'm just a robot because I'll say the same thing over and over again. I'll ask them, "What kind of 'there' is that?" "Well, it's the 'there' like the 'over there' kind." "Uh-huh. So it's spelled like 'over there' or 'over here' because 'here' is inside 'there'? Okay. Now you've got to spell it for me; I want you to do your paper and find all the rest of them and correct them." I try to kind of push them to self-correct a little bit. One thing you don't want to do is that you don't want to edit your students' papers for them. If you force a child to go back and correct the spelling themselves, they will improve much faster than if you always correct it for them. They want to save themselves work; they're not especially interested in saving you work.