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Looking for tips to improve spelling? Check out our spelling tips for students. These tips will help you with teaching spelling and spelling words.
One of the very first suffixes that I teach students is the suffix -s. This suffix makes a word plural. Teaching -s and -es builds on students’ natural speech patterns and makes a perfect introduction to the concept of base words and suffixes. Teaching the concept of plural nouns also creates a bridge to teaching…
It is important to teach the voiced sound of S fairly early in the instructional sequence. Students will need the voiced S to add the suffix -s to base words or to read vowel consonant E words with S. Because voiced S is such a prevalent part of our speech, this is a concept that…
There are several reasons why recognizing patterns in words is difficult for our students with dyslexia. Dyslexia often causes difficulty linking the phonemic analysis with the orthographic patterns. This means that a student not only has difficulty correctly hearing, analyzing, and identifying the separate sounds in a word, but in putting the sequence of letters…
The suffixing rules represent a challenging but important set of spelling generalizations. They allowed students to write a wide variety of sentences using the full range of verb tenses. Learning these suffixing rules, like the Y Rule, puts students on the path to avoiding many spelling pitfalls and being able to successfully navigate the writing…
A particularly challenging, but important, set of spelling generalizations are the suffixing rules. They are important for students to be able to write using more natural-sounding language. For example, He did hop sounds far more awkward and stilted than He hopped. Learning the suffixing rules, like the drop e rule, expands possibilities for our students…
One category of spelling rules that is particularly important is suffixing. These rules are particularly important because suffixes are so frequently used in our written language. Writing even a simple paragraph without suffixes is an incredibly difficult task and results in the use of awkward language that doesn’t sound particularly natural. Learning a few basic…
If you were to write a job description for yourself, chances are it would be full of many varied types of tasks of varying complexities. As an educator, you wear many hats. You fill many different roles in the lives of your students and in the culture of our schools. Like human jobs, phonograms have…
Although the hard sound for g is more common than the soft sound, eventually the soft sound becomes necessary to learn and master. Many children may already associate the /j/ sound with the letter g due to the letter name. However, due to its greater utility, we typically teach the hard g sound first. Prerequisites…
You will find most teachers of children with dyslexia are not fans of the weekly spelling test. Words arranged by theme or covering multiple spelling patterns is a recipe for failure for many of our students. Other students may manage to learn the words for the Friday spelling test, but not be able to spell…