Below are spelling lists. Some of them are lists of high frequency words. You may be surprised by how many of the words your child cannot spell.

Make sure that your child knows the meaning of a word before they learn how to spell it. If they do not know what it means, it is very unlike that they would include it in their reading so it would not matter how it is spelt! Children have to be able to use  the word appropriately in sentences. 

Learn how to spell the days of the week, the months of the year, the name of each subject (e.g. science; history; geography; religious education; physical education; etc.)

Learn how to spell subject specific vocabulary. e.g. circle; square; parallelogram; quadrilateral; vertical; horizontal; predict; method; investigate; results; conclusion; etc. 

There are many ways of learning how to spell. These include:

Ways to Learn Your Spellings

Choose a different activity each night to help you learn your spellings.

1) Write the spelling in colour. Highlight the tricky parts in a different colour.

2) Sing your spellings to a catchy tune or chant. Example: EI - GHT

3) Anagrams. Cut card into squares of equal size. On each square, write a different letter that the word contains. For example: for the because you will have one square with 'b' on it, two with 'e', one with 'c', and-so-on. Shuffle them up and rearrange them to the correct order as quick as you can.

4) Write a mnemonic to help you learn your spellings. You could also make a fun poem with them. For example: The rain went my brain in Spain.

5) Place the letters on the floor for your spelling word.  Jump or hop to the letter required to spell the word, calling the letters out loud.

6) Write out your spelling words and put them on the floor. Act out one of the words. A partner has guess which word is being acted out.

7) Look, cover, say, write, check. Look at the spelling you are learning. Cover them up. Say the spelling out loud. Write the spelling down. Check to see if you got it right.

Pyramid Spelling: Build up the letter one word at a time.

p

py

pyr

pyra

pyram

pyrami

pyramid

Look--> Cover --> Say --> Write --> Check

0. Look at the word and read it twice. Focus on the tricky parts.
0. Cover the word so you cannot see it.
0. Say the word out loud. Then spell it out loud.
0. Write the word down.
0. Check you spelt it correctly.

Break the Word into Chunks

Break the word into chunks. Colour each section of the word using a different colour for each part.

col-our-ful

bus-i-ness

Magic Finger

Pretend to write the words in big pictures in the air. Words can also be written or painted much bigger than they would normally be written.

Phonics

Please see the Phonics section towards the beginning of the English page.

Learn how to spell a variety of prefixes and suffixes

A prefix appears before the root (main) part of the word. For example: unhappy. The root word is happy. The prefix is 'un'.

A suffix appears after the root word. For example: colourful. The suffix is 'ful'.

Learn the Spelling Rules

Examples include: 

If a word ends in 'e', drop the 'e' and add the suffix: 'ing.' For example: 'file' would become 'filing'.

If a word ends in a consonant and a 'y' e.g. baby and you want to make it a plural, drop the 'y' and add the suffix 'ies.'

However, if the word ends in a vowel, followed by 'y', just adds.

If a word ends in either 'o,' zz,' 'ch' or 'sh,'  to turn it into a plural, add 'es.' Examples: volcano becomes volcanoes; tomato becomes tomatoes, fizz becomes fizzes; torch becomes torches; bush becomes bushes.

If a word ends in 'l', e.g. powerful, it ends in one 'l' and not two.

The letter 'h' can be silent. Several question words begin with 'wh': who ; what; when; where; why. Take care that 'were' is not confused with 'where.'

Mnemonics

I have made a mnemonic for some words. Look at the first letter of each word in the sentence if you are unsure of the meaning of 'mnemonic'.

Multiple Choice

Create a table that has up to four columns. If you use three columns, spell the word incorrectly in two of them and spell the word correctly in one of them. The learner has to choose the correct spelling. Ideally, make one of the words slightly misspelled or choose a common mistake that people make. Examples are below:

Make sure that the learner spends time learning how to spell homonyms. Homonyms are words that are either spelled the same or pronounced the same but have different meanings. For example: sea and see; whether and weather; their; there; they're.

Mario Spelling

Let's pretend that the learner has eight spellings to learn. Write them in the way shown below.

To complete the level the learner has to correctly spell all of the words written in the given order. If they mistake, they lose a life (they could start with three) or gain a black mark (which also signifies a mistake) and must go back to beginning, just like if your character died in a video game. Each time the learner has to go back to the beginning, they are embedding how to spell the words correctly.

Be the Editor

Give the learner some text that includes misspelled words. You can let them know how many words are incorrectly spelled. The learner needs to find and correct them.

100 High Frequency Words