Putting the Letters Together: Helping your child spell and write
Dear Parents,
Picture this, you walk into a local Starbucks and order your usual grande latte with whip cream. The barista asks for your name and writes it on the cup. Once your order is complete, you get your full cup of coffee and realize the barista spelled your name completely wrong. Translating sounds to letters and letters to sounds is a difficult task. Luckily as children, we learned rules about using letters to represent different sounds and used our memory to spell less familiar and tricky words.
When learning to spell, there are many different approaches. First, children learn that words are made up of different sounds, we SLP's like to call this phonological awareness. This skills is important when spelling, helping children to represent all the sounds they hear in the word. An example of a spelling error of phonemic awareness would be a child spelling stop as 'sop'. In this example, the child forgot to represent the sound 't'. Another reason a child might make a spelling error is because of graphemic awareness. This would happen when the child doesn't know which letter to use to represent the sound, like in spelling they as 'thay'. Children eventually learn that different letters can make one sound ,such as the 'th' sound, and some letters can make different sounds like the letter C. Words that are used a lot or have challenging spelling maybe learned as a whole, so children can spell them by memory and not have to sound them out. These types of words are called mental graphemic representations. Children also use their knowledge of grammar to help them spell. For example, they may remember that all past tense words have '-ed' at the end of the word. They also learn that some letters cannot be combined in the English language, like 'pv'.
Dear parents, below are some tips to help your child be a master speller.
-Play word scramble games (ex. say a word and have your child rearrange cut-out letters to spell the word)
-Play word sorting games (ex. sort words that start with the same sounds, or have similar spellings.)
-Point out words that sound alike and talk about why they sound alike. This is great to use while reading rhyming books (ex. "how are hop and pop alike?").
-Read! Spelling is closely tied to reading, so reading and pointing out words will help children develop a memory for how to spell them.
-Together with your child, make up a grocery list before going to the store.
-When playing with letters, use ones that look like objects or animals that represent the letter. Children will better remember their associated sounds!
-write vocabulary words out, instead of just saying them out loud.
Check out these Apps to help develop spelling:
Resources:
Apel, K., & Masterson, J. J. (2001). Theory-guided spelling assessment and intervention: A case study. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 32(3), 182-195.
http://www.readingrockets.org/
http://www.elltoolbox.com/words-their-way.html#.Wj0xk9-nHIV