What the lesson is about

A special collection for the youngest primary children upwards includes practical and inspiring materials to help them.

Getting started

Spelling mats and tricky word mats are always useful. James_r_d uploaded a spelling mat for printing out and laminating for the youngest age group. This has proved very popular. It has days of the week, months, dates, numbers, colours, and a few words for each letter of the alphabet. Reasid has published a colourful mat for trickier words and phonemes, so nasties such as “there, their, thought and through” are here, and phonemes such as “igh”, “ear”, “air” and “ure”.

Taking it further

Casabrindi has uploaded some useful activities for learning spelling - these ideas are sent home with words to be learnt and give children and parents fun strategies for learning them. For example, play hangman with a partner using your words, or design a board game to play with your words. Missspecial has written some fairytale word banks to go with her smartboard images for Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks. For upper primary, there is an attractive poster with spelling strategies for children having problems, such as “Can I break it down into syllables or phonemes?” or “Is there a root in the word I can spell .?” Suebee1 has produced a CVC caption spelling notebook, where children can click on the picture to hear the caption, and drag the letters into the correct box to spell the words in it. They then click on the sound spots to see if they are correct.

Where to find it

www.tes.co.ukprimary-spelling.