Developing spelling rules

After teaching common spelling rules such as past tense verbs or plurals, it’s important to revisit these regularly. Sometimes, it’s difficult to keep the activities varied and interesting. A child I am working with is doing a topic at school all about spies and MI5. We created a word bank of important vocabulary that he could use at school but now we use the words to revisit suffixes that could be added. This continues to reinforce spelling rules. I wrote the word on the whiteboard and then he used magnetic letters to change the endings. This way, he could delete letters that aren’t needed by placing the new letters over the top.

We were able to look at the suffix ‘tion’ and discuss the morphology of the suffix- ‘tion’ turns a verb to a noun and its meaning is ‘the result of’. So, if you investigate (verb), the result is (tion) an investigation. My student was then able to relate this to other words: operation and frustration. If you get ‘frustrated’ the result is ‘frustration’.

This is a nice activity to do with older children as it can enhance vocabulary as well as develop spellings.