Spelling PLD

teaching the brain to read

- right side of brain understands language, left side understands print.

short term memory to mastery

New Learning

Fluency - need to have new information 4 times to get to fluency. Some children may need thousands of exposures to this learning.

Maintenance - regular practice and reviewing information

Application - can spell it correctly in your writing

Mastery - can use the information to learn new things

Working Memory

- different to general memory

- link to

familar

predictable

chunking

meaningful

patterns - less than 7 numbers

rhyme

Children a struggling with working memory because they don't need to use it as much in 21st Century life

Essential lists - no patterns so hard to learn in a spelling list. I am now going to change my spelling for the lower group to be patterns rather than words they 'need' to learn. Based on 'th' sound first.

Sticky Note planning - oral language around what you are writing about. write down key words on post-it notes, add in an adjective for each thing. fix up spelling for them then they use the post-it notes to write their writing.

What works for our learners:

What is controllable and what is uncontrollable?

- knowledge, attitude and strategy they are in control of/can find help with

- ability not in control, need to accept it

Power of visuals, rhyme and patterns

- use with Amiri and Nicholas,

said - silly ants in disco (draw ants, act out ants)

because - big elephants cause accidents under small elephants

draw, act out, chant to help it stick

Steps to be a successful reader:

step one: what I know about words - oral language

step two: what i know about sounds in words - phonological words e.g long vs short vowels

step three: what I know about sound patterns

step four: comprehension

morphological - meaning of parts of words e.g. -ing un- dis- -ed

Challenge - how do you meet all needs, some children in our class are still working at step one when others are at step four and everything in between. How can we fit in detailed word study programmes when we are already stretched as much as possible catering for different reading and writing abilities. Do we need to do a block focus on spelling? How to we then maintain this? I feel this is an area I really need to work on for my learners.

Weekly programme idea

Monday - whole class teaching - based on gap analysis from topic test, display new learning in a very visual way. - new learning stage

Tuesday and Wednesday - group differentiation (practice tasks) - fluency and maintenance stages

Thursday - Fluency and Maintenance, whole class or groups, proof-reading or dictation of spelling words in sentences (alternate) - application stage

Friday - spelling test lists (highlight word sounds in homework lists to make it visual)

troubled spellers independent task - write out spelling words independently in Alconian (?) boxes

Cognitive space

have 2 less than our age until a maximum of 7. for kids that struggle 1 could be taken with sitting still, 1 could be taken with listening and 1 with generating ideas - none left for spelling

Only ever get to 7 cognitive spaces

**every syllable has a vowel**

This PD was very timely for me as I have been struggling to cater for all the spelling needs in my class at the moment. We have children who are writing random letters to children who are spelling very complicated words correctly. I am now going to take some time to slow brain this process and information and try and build a programme catering for more needs efficiently in our class. I am hoping to get to the stage where our lower children can work on some of these tasks independently after they have been taught a particular sound or rule. I think this needs to be a real focus in our team for writing for a while over genre. We need to break our writing groups down more to target these needs in a smarter way.