What Parents Can Do

What Parents Can Do:

Read aloud, perhaps having the child follow along looking at the print.
Talk about words and demonstrate a fascination with words. Have a “Vocabulary night” once a week. Dinner conversation focuses on talk about interesting words, and a dictionary is present.
Praise your child’s best invented spellings, and focus first on what the child knows.
Reinforce the strategies being taught in school.
Encourage writing at home for real reasons – letters, notes, memos, lists.
Play word games

Specific family activities for Prephonemic and Early Phonemic Spellers

Stay after a movie is over and watch the credits roll. Have your child find all the letters in his or her name. Or look for all of the Cs.
Go through a magazine with your child looking for pictures of things that begin with a certain letter. Connect it to something meaningful. If your child’s name begins with a B, look for pictures of things that start with B. Make a page that has a big B on the top. Have your child cut out all the pictures that start with B and paste them on the page.
Encourage writing at home by having a “Writing Table” stocked with:
Many kinds of writing instruments: pencils, pens, crayons, markers
Many kinds of paper: cards, envelopes, construction paper, different colors of paper, lined paper, plain paper, graph paper, Post-it Notes, business cards, stationery
Scissors
Glue
Tape

Write letters to your child and leave your notes on his “Writing Table” or in his lunchbox. Encourage him to write back to you.

When you are preparing to go to the grocery store invite your child to help you with the shopping list. If your child needs more apple juice for his lunch box have him look at the words apple juice on the box and tell you how to spell the words. He will read the letters to you as you write them on the list. When you are at the store, in the juice section, have your child find the apple juice and match the words on your list.
Cut out letters from magazines so your child can see all of the different ways a letter can look. Ex: G, g, g, G, g, G

Specific family activities for Phonemic Spellers

When students are at this stage of development they are becoming aware of their spelling errors and often want to spell everything “the right way.”

If the word they are attempting is one of our “No Excuse Words” then have your child first try to write the word three times and then circle the one that “looks Right” and then check the word on his portable word wall. This activity will accomplish three of our spelling goals: raising spelling consciousness, developing use of references, building stronger visual memory.
If the word they are attempting is a new word then have your child write it. In school we say, “Use all that you know about letters, sounds, and patterns and work out the best spelling you can of the word.” Then after the first attempt, we write the word two other ways—our best attempts. We then look at the three attempts and circle the one that looks right. After going through this process students often come up with the correct spelling.
Play spelling games using common patterns. For example, if your child is practicing the common pattern, “ai,” you can make up a game. Make up letter cards that have common beginnings: b, c, d, m, p, sh, str, pl, dr, etc. and cards that have common endings: t, nt, l, m, st, n, r, etc. Have your child match up the card to the common “ai” vowel combination to make up new words.

Specific family activities for Standard Spellers

Explore common suffixes and prefixes. Have your child begin a word collection of words that start with any of the following prefixes:

Also collect words with common suffixes:

Students at this stage can be challenged in word games such as Scrabble and Boggle. Be sure to have a good dictionary nearby.
On-line resources that explore words and spelling are invaluable if you have on-line access. Here are three excellent web sites for spelling at this stage:

Webster’s dictionary site with links to word study activities.