Teaching word structure and spelling in Year 3
Children in Year 3 will know how to spell 200 of the words that occur most
frequently in writing. They should be able to write these words automatically
without having to either segment the regular words into phonemes or stop to
recall the spelling of the irregular words. However, there will some children
who are still having difficulty getting the letters round the right way in some of
the high frequency words such as their. The vowel digraphs will have been
taught in Year 1 and reinforced in Year 2 but they still present problems for
children because even if they know the choices, they may not know which one
to use.
In Year 2, children were taught to spell words adding -ing and -ed. They rarely
have difficulty adding -ing because it is spelled as it sounds but they probably
will not have a secure understanding of the doubling rule. Some children may
still be writing as they pronounce and write in instead of -ing. Adding -ed to
verbs requires an awareness that the state or action they are writing about is
in the past tense because most verbs ending in -ed do not sound -ed.
Children who use only phonics to write past tense verbs write played as plaid
or playd, jumped as jumpt and started as startid. They may in theory know
that -ed is required for past tense but do not necessarily recognise past tense
when they want to use it.
Spelling unfamiliar words when writing
Generally Year 3 is a critical year for moving from a primarily phonics-based
spelling approach to one that takes more account of morphemic word
structure. Firstly it must be remembered that when children are writing they
know the correct spellings of quite a few words, but in every sentence they
write there will be some words for which they have only partial recall and
some which they may never have previously encountered in texts. In order to
maintain the fluency in writing they need to construct effective sentences
children should have enough knowledge of word structure to be able to spell
any word they wish to write sufficiently accurately for later reading.
Imagine that the child has constructed a sentence in their head, written the
first four words and does not know the correct spelling of the next word. The
child has the word they want to write in their phonological memory as a
spoken word, so the logical first step is to segment the word into each
constituent syllable and then each syllable into phonemes. The child then
represents each phoneme in correct order with an appropriate grapheme.
Children in Year 3 should be able to represent all of the 44 phonemes with an
accurate grapheme. They should know at least two alternate graphemes for
most vowel phoneme and observe some of the orthographic conventions such
as using ay, y and ow at the ends of words and ai i-e and oa in the middle.
They should be able to add -ed to past tense verbs regardless of the
phonemic structure of the end of the word. Although they know how to do it,
they may not remember to double the final letter in short-vowel CVC words
before adding -ing or -ed. Their attention is focused on holding the formed
sentence in memory as well as figuring out how to write an unknown word.
But they have enough information at this age to make a close approximation
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of the word. If a higher standard of spelling is required for the piece of work,
they can search for the correct spelling in a dictionary when they have
finished writing and possibly redrafting the work.
Teaching proofreading
Children need to be taught how to proofread their work as part of the writing
process. This process starts during Year 2 and runs throughout Year 3 so that
children become increasingly confident in their ability to check and correct
their work. Editing for spelling (or typographic errors) should take place after
the writer is satisfied with all other elements of the writing. It is important that
teachers model the proofreading process in shared text work. The following
suggestion for teaching proofreading is from Year 2 and Year 3 planning
exemplification and spelling programme, page 80. These materials are
available on www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary/publications/literacy/849451
1. Preparation: Towards the end of a unit of work, after the children have
revisited and revised their work in terms of structure and content, sentence
construction and punctuation, the teacher selects an example of one child’s
work, writes it out and makes a few changes so that it is not immediately
recognisable.
2. Shared writing: Read through the work as the children follow, explaining
that you are looking for a particular type of spelling error, related to specific
recent teaching focuses (e.g. the spelling of -ed endings.) Think aloud as you
identify each error and go through a routine:
– underline the part of the word that you think is wrong and explain your
doubts
– try out an alternative spelling
– does it look right?
– check from another source, e.g. words around the room, another child,
spelling log, dictionary
– write in the correct spelling.
Repeat this until the target words have been corrected. Are there any patterns
in these errors? Is there a strategy that would help us to avoid the same
errors in future (e.g. consonant doubling for short vowels)?
3. Independent and guided writing: Children repeat the same process for their
own writing. Less confident writers can be supported in this process with
guided writing sessions.
Learning to spell words
When children have proofread their writing and corrected any errors, it is
important that they learn to spell those words for future use. They could be
provided with a personal spelling log for recording these words. In addition to
these words, there are words such as those in List 3 and others required
across the curriculum children need to be able to recall quickly when writing
and which therefore need to be learned. The approach to learning spelling in
the Year 2 and Year 3 planning exemplification and spelling programme
suggests that children analyse the structure of a word to be learned, asking
the question ‘Why is this word spelled like this?’ The teaching on word
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structure will help children to answer this question. But sometimes children
need to spell words that have an irregular feature. Children should be
encouraged to find parts of the word that fit a convention and then to decide
upon some way to remember the ‘tricky’ part. For instance, the notorious word
yacht has three phonemes, two of which are spelled perfectly regularly. The
/o/ phoneme is represented by three very unusual letters. Children invent
different ways to recall this group of letters. Some prefer to visualise the
shape, others to say the letter names, others to create a mnemonic. The
process of analysing it into three phonemes with an ‘odd middle’ goes a long
way to helping children remember it.
Learning word structure
Phonics
In Year 3 children should know the available vowel choices and which ones
are the most common. For instance, the ate word ending (e.g. gate, ornate,
isolate) is much more common than the ait ending (e.g. wait). But increasingly
in this year they should be able to spell more and more words containing
regular vowel digraphs correctly, for example, knowing which words contain
ee and which ea, which ai and which the split digraph a-e, which oa and which
the split digraph o-e.
Doubling rule
By the end of Year 3, they should be sufficiently familiar with the doubling
rule, that words such as spining and weted look wrong for spinning and
wetted. They also need to apply the doubling rule when adding other suffixes
such as y, er and est.
Past tense
Children in Year 3 should be aware that they are using past tense and end
verbs with -ed. They should also be aware that some irregular past tense
verbs are, in fact, spelt phonemically with a t .
‘W’ special and other orthographic irregularities
A number of common words begin with wa – wash, watch, was or swa swan,
swap, swallow – where the letter a represents the phoneme /o/. The /er/
phoneme is spelled or after letter w – worth, worse, work.
Prefixes and suffixes
Year 3 expands the children’s knowledge of suffixes and prefixes and they
need to know that sometimes the spelling of the stem alters when adding
some suffixes, but that sometimes adding a prefix or suffix will mean that
there are two of the same letter consecutively in a word e.g. unnecessary,
keenness.
There are investigation games, activities and word lists for teaching the
conventions for word structure in the Year 2 and Year 3 planning
exemplification and spelling programme.
This programme contains a full programme of work in spelling for Year 3.
There are 15 units covering the year. Each unit is a fortnight’s work – five
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teaching sessions. These sessions cover: teaching conventions, teaching how
to learn words, and practising and applying in writing.
Source material/further information: 1
Teaching Literacy and Mathematics in Year 3 DfES 0495/2003
Grammar for Writing DfEE 0107/2000
Year 2 and Year 3 planning exemplification and spelling programme. DfES 0493-2003
NLS Spelling Bank
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Any references to the NLS ‘searchlights model’ in these documents need to be interpreted in the
light of the recommendations of the Rose review.
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