Introduction
This document attempts to put a practical class based framework around the phonics
pedagogy outlined in the school’s document “The Teaching of Phonics”.
Please note that this document is written for all children bar those on the SEN register whose
provision is met through IEPs and individual targeted work mainly undertaken by teaching
assistants in both key stages.
Groupings for Spellings
There are 3 major groups of spellers in the school and these have sub-groups within them.
The groups are as follows:
1. The Phonics Phase
2. The Phonic Consolidation Phase
3. Post Phonic Phase
Each group should be treated as different in their own right and the teaching and learning that
ensues in each group will be unique to each phase.
1. The Phonics Phase
These children are all “taught” phonics in a seemingly didactic manner. Whilst purists might
wish to see a more “emergent” or child-centred approach, the rationale behind the teacherdriven lesson hinges on two areas. The early phases of writing do not always lend themselves
to a natural progression through the phonics pyramid, but also there is the simple pragmatic
element of how one teaches phonics in a class of 30 reception age children. The systematic
teaching of phonics in this way provides children with the tools they need to become effective
writers and latterly true “emergent” spellers.
Within this phase there are three distinct groups:
i
Letter sounds: These are a group of early learners who are seeking to gain an
understanding of the basic letter sounds
There are then two groups which have very different foci and we should not confuse the two
as they are seeking to fulfil very different things
ii
Blending Skills: These children have moved on from initial letter sounds and are at a
stage where they are blending sounds such as -st, -tr, cl, etc.
I am rapidly moving to a position where I am wondering whether we need to “teach” each
sound. We need to look into how easy children find it to blend (and segment, where
1
necessary) the letter sounds into these initial blends. We may be “teaching” something
and spending inordinate amounts of time on an area of phonics which is relatively
intuitive for a child with a good secure grasp of phonetic letter sounds. Therefore at
present the school teaches the principles of blending to the children and leaves them to
blend letter sounds as they arise rather then teaching each separate sound in individual
lessons.
iii Vowel Sounds: The group of phonetic sounds that probably need to be taught are the
short and long vowel sounds. There is little hope of a child will be able to blend “ow” to
make a long “o” sound without explicit instruction and even less likely to create a long
“i” sound out of the letters –igh. These therefore need to be taught in the same manner as
the letter sounds and need to be seen as the key building blocks in phonetic learning. The
other group of words that would fall into this category would be the “special h’s” e.g. -ch,
-th etc which again create a new sound beyond simple blending when used together.
2. The Phonic Consolidation Phase
This group are those children who have a secure grasp of all the phonic sounds listed above.
They can blend and segment with an element of consistency; they know letter sounds and
know most if not all of the vowel sounds. There is little point “teaching” these children
spelling because they have the building blocks for them to engage with spelling patterns and
letter forms from their own work which is a more powerful form of learning.
Children working at this level will show a good phonetic understanding in their written work
and much of their writing will be understandable but there will be clear patterns of spelling
errors through their literacy books. Many of these will relate to regular patterns which can
then be collated and learnt. (see below)
The rationale behind learning spelling within the context of their own writing is two fold:
1. If children are learning words from their own spellings then by definition they are hitting
the words they need to learn because these are the words in their own vocabulary.
2. The problem for these children is not that they do not know how to spell the “beak” (on a
bird) it is just that they don’t know which rule to employ in this context. The decision to
be made is between spelling the word as “beke”, “beek”, or “beak” all of which are
phonetically correct but only one is right in context. This problem becomes even more
acute when heteronyms (one of a group of words with identical spellings but different
meanings and pronunciations) are used. In the sentence “the car’s breaks/brakes did not
work” the child has two “correct” spellings to choose from. In the past we have tried to
teach these out context and separate from their own writing, this is fundamentally flawed
as a teaching philosophy.
3. There may also be consistent foibles in spelling patterns that are unique to them as
individuals that they should be seeking to address; e.g. the child who spells words with
the suffix – “shun”, or the child who adds “t” to verbs instead of “-ed”. These can be
tackled swiftly and effectively at this level through individual engagement with the child
through the errors in their own writing.
A word on context – The two points above demonstrate the role of context. It does not mean
that the learning of the spelling has to be done in the context of the sentence or the piece of
2
writing. In fact I don’t know how you would do this at all. The children need to log the
spelling, record it noting the pattern of the letters (see point 2 below) and move on.
The key to this phase in a child’s spelling development is that they are seeing two things
occurring in their learning:
1. They understand the correct phonetic spelling through the context (see point 2 above)
2. They are consolidating the vowel (and other spelling) patterns. It is this latter element
which will prove to be the most powerful in the long term. As we have seen (see the
document – The Teaching of Phonics) good spellers are able to determine and recognise
patterns and sequences of letters as being correct. So the child who spells train as “trian”
has a double problem. Firstly, he can’t spell train, but much more importantly he has not
seen that the majority of words in English do not use the “ia” combination of letters. The
deeper learning occurs when a child starts to build up these patterns of correct word
formation. Similarly the child who writes “walkt” has obviously not understood that the
greatest chance of the spelling being correct would be an –ed on the end.
If this is where the children need to head towards then it would seem obvious that they should
focus on the words with the most common and the most basic spelling patterns. This leads us
back to the phonics pyramid, the children should first engage with the short and long vowel
sounds and the “special h” words. So even in this (seeming) post-phonic phase the teacher and
the child should continue to use the phonics pyramid to drive the spelling patterns and
formations that the children should engage with.
In a practical sense the children should be given opportunity to see spelling patterns in their
own work and pick these out. Depending on the maturity of the child or the complexity of the
pattern this may be child initiated or teacher led. They should focus on the area of weakness
and this should (if possible) be a pattern in the phonics pyramid, or a common standard
spelling pattern e.g. -ed , -tion, etc. These should be logged so the child can see the pattern
clearly.
To avoid overload I would expect that no child should be focusing on any more than 3
patterns at any one time and these should form targets that should be placed in their Literacy
book along with their normal writing targets. As they conquer each one then the target drops
off and a new spelling replaces it. This provides a record of progression for the teacher, and
more importantly for the child.
The question remains; “What do we do with the spellings once the child has collated them?” I
do believe that simply focusing on the pattern and its construction may be powerful enough.
Research has shown that the teaching of spelling generally falls down because many of the
strategies fail to focus on this single central aspect. Having said that I would still see nothing
wrong with the child using these and other patterns for their spelling tests as it consolidates a
bespoke pattern that is individually targeted.
We need to avoid the superficial elements of consolidation such as taking the word and
writing it in to a fresh sentence which I suspect adds little for the child in terms of learning the
specific spelling error. In truth 95% of the sentence they write will probably contain words
they can spell already and the likelihood is the mass of words around the spelling pattern will
probably detract from the key element which is for the child to focus in on correcting the
specific error rather than the words around it. e.g. In the word “trian” the child needs to focus
on the “ai” element of the spelling not the 12 words encompassing it within a sentence. The
engagement with the pattern is key.
3
Running alongside the collating of spelling patterns the child may well develop their own
spelling lists of seemingly unrelated words which they have spelt wrong in their written work
and which the teacher has subsequently corrected. These may form some of the words that
they take home for the weekly spelling test. The key feature is that the child should
increasingly take ownership of this process and seek to see these words as a personal
challenge to be tackled. This engagement with their own spelling development needs to
underpin the whole process and will ultimately determine the child’s success in this realm.
The maintaining of the list by the child will allow them to be in control of the learning and
also to track their own progress throughout the year as they successfully learn to spell the
words correctly.
However… As children progress along this path they should soon be able to understand most,
if not all of the major building blocks in the English spelling system. There will come a point
where the only pattern a child (or a teacher) can find in their work might be one as obscure as
“the -eigh sound” which makes a long “a” sound in the word “eight” or “neighbour”. Once
the child is at this level it seems pointless to categorise the spellings in the same form as in
previous phases, especially as those two words, along with “neigh” are the only common ones
I can think of that use that sound. The child has reached a point where to collate patterns from
their own work would prove a source of frustration because their writing is unlikely to contain
a plethora of spellings that relate to any one rule. This becomes a watershed and the child
must move onto the next stage.
3. The Post-Phonic Phase
The features in this phase are that the child has reached a point where they are both
phonetically strong and also have a good grasp as to how the long and short vowel sounds are
used in specific words; e.g. they write “train” as opposed to “trayn”, even though the latter is
phonetically correct. To this end the majority of their work will be spelt correctly and there
will be few words that need to be corrected. Most of these may well be words that are
phonetically irregular or complex in their construction. It is probably worth noting that this
phase probably comes sooner than we might think, and would certainly apply to some of the
more able children in Year 2.
At this point there needs to be a definite shift in the role of the teacher and this is very
significant. The previous two phases have both focused on the child’s work as a source for
spellings and the child has been instrumental in collecting and collating the patterns. At this
point this is not feasible and the emphasis for the progression switches from the child to the
teacher. Whereas the child may be working on “the –ai sound” and will be collecting words
relating to this, the child will now be working on uncommon patterns and the emphasis will
be on the teacher to supply related words and derive a meaningful context in which they can
be learnt.
This can be facilitated through two teaching strategies. Whilst the latter is probably a
progression on the former the likelihood is that the two will run in tandem with the teacher
selecting the appropriate strategy for any given situation.
1. Providing Additional Words
The teacher may provide (or preferably encourage the child to explore for themselves)
words with a similar spelling pattern. To be fair this may occur in the previous phases at
times but in this phase this will be the predominant feature. The child might misspell
“archaeology” using the prefix “ark” and then the teacher will encourage the child to
explore other words with this spelling pattern.
4
2. Providing Extension Activites
Leading on (sometimes seamlessly) from the above the teacher may encourage the child
to engage with the construction of words and their origin. For instance using the word
above, the “arch” prefix in archaeology means several things: primary or main (as in arch
enemy) supreme (as in archbishop) earlier or original (as in archaeology) and as a suffix,
ruler or leader (as in matriarch/patriarch). The purpose here is two fold; firstly to drive
home the pattern in the spelling but more importantly for the child to develop a deeper,
richer love and appreciation of the English language.
This phase should also include the additional word based activities found within the
National Literacy Strategy; e.g.
Understand that vocabulary changes over time e.g. through collecting words which have
become little used and discussing why e.g. frock, wireless,
Children should also study the roots of words and their derivatives from the Latin and the
Greek developing a rich understanding of their literary heritage
What does this look like in classroom practice? I would see the child in this phase having
their own “Dictionary” as in the previous two phases. The literacy Strategy still encourages
children to “explore the full range of spelling conventions and rules” well into Key Stage 2
and I believe this is still an appropriate. The difference will be that the dictionary will have a
larger element of words supplied by the teacher or words collected from arenas other than the
child’s own writing. Within this there should be a place where children can record their
findings on spelling origins, derivatives and vocabulary changes over time.
The real question in this phase relates to the learning of spelling within the context of a
weekly spelling test. For me the jury is out at present on whether the children moving through
this phase require a weekly spelling test. My own feeling is that in the early stages of the
phase this may still be appropriate where the patterns and sounds are relatively common and
familiar, however there will come a point where the teacher may find that the children are
learning ever increasingly obscure words such as; architectural, archive, archaism and
archipelago because they happened to spell “architect” wrong in their writing. This is of little
value, especially as the child is unlikely to use any of these words in a subsequent piece of
writing. Although to be fair, it could be argued that it would effectively consolidate the
spelling of the prefix. What might be more beneficial is to move the child into an arena where
they explore the derivation of the word and set this for homework.
The only other point to raise in the Post-Phonic phase is to keep tabs on the child who is
generating few spellings because they are frightened to misspell words and therefore use a
vocabulary outside of their comfort zone. Strategic marking and good word level teaching
should root this out as a matter of course but where this does not occur this should be set as a
target for the particular child and activities such as “Add a word Change a word” should
replace the word-level exercises proposed above. Again to be fair this is not new the National
Literary Strategy stated that children should;
Define familiar words but within varying constraints, e.g within four words, then three words,
then two then one and consider how to arrive at the best use of words for different purposes
Use alternative words and expressions which are more accurate or interesting than the
common words.
5
Appendix 1: The Marking of Spelling
The debate as to how many spelling should the teacher highlight when marking a piece of
written work is quite a vexed subject, but the following guidelines should be followed
Differentiation
As a rule of thumb all children should have the same amount of spellings drawn out from
each of their own pieces of work. This is because no matter what the academic ability of the
child the marking and feedback should be targeted at the needs of the child. The child in
Reception working at the phonic level may have two or three words to correct that relate to
the specific phonic sound they are presently learning. The more able child in Year 6 may have
the same number of spellings drawn from his or her work but they may well be the only
words that are spelt wrong in the whole piece of the written work. To this end the spellings
are self regulating and should tackle the simplest first leaving the more complex to another
time.
Developing a Learning Mindset
Whilst seeming like a slight contradiction of the above, we should not be frightened to mark
work rigorously. Children should be a on a “learning” rather than “performance” orientation
(Carol Dweck’s phrase) and therefore they should be in a mindset where they are delighted
with the number of words for correction because they see themselves as learners rather then
pupils seeking always to get everything right. Children in this robust form of mindset will
make better progress in all forms of learning and spelling is no exception to this. We want
children to be hungry to learn from their errors, and therefore they should respond positively
to robust marking.
Self and Peer Editing
A key feature of any form of writing is that the children should correct their own spelling
prior to teacher marking. Working with children in the past year it has been clear that many
errors in spelling relate to either, a concentration of the child on the text and narrative rather
than the spelling and/or an element of laziness in writing. Both of these can be corrected when
set in isolation at the end of the lesson if children are given time to proof read their work for
spelling. This allows them to focus solely on spelling patterns for themselves, but more
importantly stops teachers correcting spellings which will not impact greatly on the child’s
progress.
6
Appendix 2: Building blocks analogy
In working with Year 2 I came to see the acquisition of spelling as gaining a series of building
blocks with which one can build up words. The larger the blocks the more effective the
teaching and usefulness will be because the sounds, patterns and words learnt can be used in a
multiplicity of contexts. As the child moves into Key Stage 2 there will be a lessening of the
effectiveness of blanket “teaching” because the words become very “context specific” and
because they are not major building blocks within the English language, they will have a
lesser impact on the child’s spelling as a whole because the rules and patterns are less
common.
So in the diagram the learning of Letter sounds will have a huge impact on a child’s ability to
build up words because this is a fundamental building block for all words. The teaching of
long and short vowel sounds will diminish in effectiveness because the sounds are not
relevant to all words e.g. cvc words. By the time we get to the spelling pattern of –aeo found
in the word “archaeology” we have reached a point where the learning of the pattern will have
little impact on the child’s spelling as a whole because it so word specific.
This principle should drive the teaching and learning through the phases. Where the building
blocks are large then a form of didactic teaching, with children collating their own spelling
lists from their written work and consolidation either in further work or testing is duly
appropriate. As the block diminish in size then these strategies become less effective and the
teacher will have a greater input into the child’s progression, either by providing words or
moving the children towards an exploratory approach relating to the derivation of words, the
use of consolidation work and weekly tests should be closely monitored as to their
effectiveness.
7