I've always used North Lanarkshire's Active Literacy for spelling, reading and writing. Generally speaking, I like their phoneme programme for spelling, and it has been successful for most of the children I've taught. 

​However, I've always had a few children who have struggled with the phonemes, and this year isn't any different. After Christmas, I re-evaluated spelling groups, as I realised that I had a few children who were struggling to make progress with the phoneme study we were doing.

​I decided to do onset and rime with them, to see if that was a better way for them to think about spelling patterns. While progress remains slow, using this different approach has allowed these kids to be more successful, and I've also seen a bit more transference of spelling skills from spelling tests to every day writing. 

​These children were also struggling with the concept of split phonemes, or 'magic E' words. To help with this, I made some flashcards that were based on the North Lanarkshire 'word wall' cards that you can find on my blog, but which emphasised how words change when you add the 'E' to the end of them: 

These have also seemed to help the kids grasp the idea that the Magic e makes real changes to the word in question - and that if you don't add the Magic e, you aren't spelling the word you think you are spelling! 

​In addition to the word wall/flash cards for these words, I've also made playing cards for the onset and rime patterns. These cards have the picture associated with a word on one side, and the word itself on the other side.

​My kids use these cards to play the 'hula hoop' game, which is a fun way to practise the spelling patterns, as well as to check which words we know and where we are going wrong. 

In this game, the playing cards are placed, picture up, inside a hula hoop. The kids then take turns throwing a bean bag onto a card. Whichever card their bean bag lands on, they have to spell the word associated with the picture correctly. If they spell it right, they 'win' the card. If they are wrong, the card goes back into the hula hoop and the next person takes their turn. 

​At the bottom of this post, I've linked to the various files I've created for the children in my class. I hope some of these resources will help some of your own struggling spellers, and save you some time in the process! 

The blog has been very quiet for the past few months, as I've gotten to grips with teaching KS2 rather than Early (foundation) level or KS1. Moving stages (especially to a stage where you don't have experience) is time-consuming.

​One of the things I've been working on this year, however, has been making some Word Study resources for my Primary 5s who are good spellers. These resources have looked at things like suffixes, prefixes and root words. While North Lanarkshire's Active Literacy programme has spelling lists for kids at Stages 6/7, it relies on teachers developing their own material for any further word study.

​Moving to a new stage can be time consuming. For me, one of the most time consuming parts is finding and/or creating the new resources you need to teach at a different level. I suspect that is the case for many teachers, so....

​I'm posting the different files I've already made and used as part of our 'word study' programme this year, and I'll come back to this post and add others as I make them. If you are using North Lanarkshire's programme, these should hopefully be useful. But they can also be used with any kind of grammar or word study programme.

​In each file, there are basic word study lists - which give 12-14 examples of words that begin with a given prefix, or end with a certain suffix, etc. Then there is an additional page for most of the files - this page varies a bit, but is most often a list of root words and/or definitions of the words the children will be working with (you can see an example above and below).​

​The lists themselves (right)  can be used as straightforward spelling lists. The additional page allows you to easily expand the types of tasks the children are doing with the words. You can have the children use the words in sentences, write short paragraphs, etc. Used this way, the lists can help build vocabulary - there isn't any point knowing how to spell words if you are not going to be able to use them in your writing.

​In the example at the top of this post, the original word list focuses on words with the prefixes 'pre' and 're'. In the file, you'll find both of the lists on the same page. I cut them out and folded the sheet in half - this gave me an A5 size document with the 'pre' words on one side and the 're' words on the other. The cards are laminated, so they can be re-used.

​As a side note - the picture above says ABLE and IBLE Homophones - I made this mistake on my list, but the 'homophones' has been taken out of the file I've posted (I was originally going to focus on homophones that week, but decided against it).

​-PRE and -RE prefixes

-ABLE and -IBLE suffixes

​CO- COL- CON- and COM- prefixes

​-LY and -ILY suffixes

​FRACT FRAG and DICT word root list

​-OUS and -IOUS suffixes