Research School Network: The frustration of teaching spellings! Why can’t children remember how to spell the words that they have just been taught?!?!

We can’t be the only school who teach the spelling rules as set out in the National Curriculum and in the spelling lessons, all the children can spell most of the words, can talk about them and can use them appropriately. Then comes the writing lesson, and any spelling knowledge the children had has floated out of their brains never to be seen again. They are using the wrong homophones, forgetting to double consonants when adding a suffix, or, the worst one, missing the letter e from an ed ending – the list is never-ending.

At Wilbraham, the literacy team is trying a different approach to see what impact it has on children remembering how to spell words in all lessons. We spent time exploring different spellings schemes that we could buy, but all required a lot of time during the week that we just didn’t have in our jam-packed curriculum. Instead of dedicating more time to teaching spelling, we decided to ensure that the time we have is used more efficiently and, hopefully, becomes more effective.

As a school, we are really working on implementing metacognition as an approach to how we teach, scaffold, and pass on the responsibility of learning to the pupils so we wanted to ensure that spellings followed this more closely than before.

We thought about the knowledge of task, strategy and self and realised that we needed to spend some time unpicking spelling strategies to share with the children. Whenever you talk to adults about spelling, everyone seems to have an anecdote about they remember to spell certain words – these are in fact strategies that we have developed to aid our memory of these words.

After a lot more work, we identified lots of different strategies and then grouped them under 4 main headings.

We know have a set of agreed strategies to be explicitly taught throughout school and shared visuals and posters so that the knowledge from previous years is built on as children progress through school. These strategies can be included in spelling lesson as and when they link to the spelling rule or specific words. We want the children to be able to explore which strategy works for them for different words and, if there is one word they keep struggling with, to use the strategies to help them remember it.

As well as the strategies, we have tweaked the lesson structure to follow the metacognitive 7 step lesson, however, we do not cover all 7 steps in one lesson. Instead, we work through the 7 steps for each spelling rule. This might be the lessons in 1 week or it might cover 2 weeks as there is some flexibility in our spelling curriculum overview.

(from Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning guidance report)

How do we know that this will improve children’s knowledge of spelling and remove the frustration when marking independent writing?

The honest answer is that we don’t know that it will work. However, we have followed the principles in the Implementation guidance report and stuck to the process diagram (shown below). We have spent over a term exploring how to teach spelling and a further term preparing resources and training materials before the delivery phase began to ensure we have the best chance of success.

(from Putting Evidence to Work: A School’s Guide to Implementation guidance report)

Additionally, we have monitoring ​‘check points’ in place so we can assess how it is all going – we can assess the uptake of ​‘faithful adoption’ and see if there are areas where ​‘intelligent adaptation’ can take place.

I am off on maternity leave now and I can’t wait to return to school to see how this approach is going – good luck to my literacy team! J

Sarah Izon

Director of Aspirer Research School
Literacy Lead at Wilbraham Primary School