Susan Miller Fryrear's

     

These three examples: word charts, word walls, and ABC walls serve as a vehicle for teaching:   

• thinking of where the word might have appeared and locating it
• looking it up in the dictionary or on the word walls or word charts

Visualizing
As younger students are chanting favorite stories and poems from sentence strips in pocket charts, they can practice spelling a familiar word over and over. They can close their eyes and visualize that word, spelling it back together. The teacher might explain how this strategy can help with other words. This needs to be done often to be  effective and needs to be continued throughout the upper grades.

Have-A-Go Sheet
The Have-A-Go sheet, adapted from Australia (Jo-Ann Parry and David Hornsby, Write On: A Conference Approach to Writing [Heinemann, 1988] p. 61), is based on the idea that children, like adults, can usually identify a misspelled word even if they cannot spell it correctly. Children are invited to choose misspelled words from their daily writing and attempt to “have-a-go” at standard spellings. The teacher then conferences with

the student to guide thinking processes and confirm or help with the final standard spelling. This is the technique that I use most often when I am unsure of a spelling: I write the word several different ways to see which spelling looks right. Below is a sample which you could enlarge or replicate for a classroom.

Have-A-Go
COPY
WORD
1ST
ATTEMPT
2ND
ATTEMPT
STANDARD
SPELLING

Ask A Friend (Peer Help)
This, of course, children already do, and so do we. Students quickly learn who the good spellers are and seek them out. We need to encourage collaboration as an important spelling strategy.

Two last suggestions: Read, Read, Read and Write, Write, Write. Research confirms the fact that good spellers read a lot. Children need to be reminded that reading is also a strategy for learning how to spell. When children are reading and notice words that they find interesting they can place these words in individual dictionaries or writer’s notebook. These words are ones they might want to use in their own writing.

Frank Smith said, “There is not much point in learning to spell if you have no intention of writing” (Joining the Literacy Club, Heinemann, 1988). Children need many opportunities to write. The more they write, the more they are able to practice their spelling, and the more chances they will have to improve.

If these are the strategies that adults use, then these are the strategies that we need to teach our children to prepare them for the real world.