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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.
Vowels followed by the letter r are strongly influenced in their sound by the r. It is no longer possible to pronounce a short or long vowel sound with the r. Instead, we have a vowel sound that is distorted and makes a new sound that is neither long nor short. These new sounds are…
Scribal o is a spelling convention with a fascinating historical story. The History of Scribal O Long ago, before the printing press was in common use, manuscripts were written by hand. The people who did this job were called scribes and many times they were monks. The writing style popular at the time was comprised…
The more students know the more complicated spelling becomes. They begin to need to take into consideration not only sound and symbol correspondence, but the word’s morphology and part of speech. One potentially confusing concept is words that end in -ous or -us. Both endings are pronounced /ǝs/. So how do we know when to…
As students move on to more advanced concepts, certain spelling conventions don’t fit neatly into a clear-cut rule with a catchy turn of phrase. They are often particularly difficult for students to master. These concepts can also be challenging for teachers to explain clearly and concisely because of their complexity. In addition, unless someone has…
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…