Spelling rules

I have been teaching students about spelling rules this week. The English language is so tricky because these rules always seem to have exceptions!

Plural endings are fascinating but I wouldn’t teach the three rules in one go. This particular student had been studying the different endings for several weeks and had really embedded each situation. So we then focused on a task which brought it all together.

Then another student was looking at graphemes which make the ‘er’ sound- er, ir and ur. We looked for patterns and where in the word a grapheme may occur.

‘Er’ will often appear at the end of a root word whereas ‘ur’ and ‘it’ will often be in the middle.

We practised different words with a range of multisensory media such as play doh, colour codes and magnetic letters.

The CAT/KITE rule for deciding whether a word should start with c or k is easy to remember if you call your cat ‘consonant cat’ - so generally, an ‘a,o or u’ or indeed a consonant can be preceded by a c.

Using play doh is great fun!