Figuring out how to help kids learn to spell can be confusing. If you’ve ever helped one of your kids or students spell a word, only to have them forget what you taught them the next day, you know what I mean.
The challenge is that if kids don’t automatically catch on to reading skills, they get further and further behind as the years go on. That makes it hard for them to keep up in school, and over time they start to dread going. No one wants their child or their students to be in that situation.
While a lot of curriculums are getting pretty good at addressing early phonics skills, there are some other essential skills that aren’t emphasized as much. But addressing these skills can make all the difference.
That’s why in episode 28 of the Are they 18 yet?™ podcast, I talk about:
✅The commonly overlooked skills that kids need to read/spell longer, more difficult words.
✅Why you shouldn’t assume that certain words are “too difficult” for your kids to spell (even if they’re struggling readers).
✅Why referring to difficult spellings as “exceptions” that “don’t follow the rules” does kids a disservice.
✅Specific concepts you can teach kids to help them read more fluently and improve reading comprehension.
✅Why “memorizing” spelling words doesn’t work for struggling readers (and what to do instead).
You can listen to the entire episode here:
In this episode, I mention a blog post called “What is texting doing to reading and spelling skills?” where I dive further in to this conversation. I also talk about my Word Study Toolkit, which offers a set of definitions and concepts you can use to help build the skills kids need to be fluent readers and spellers.
Here’s what’s inside the Word Study Toolkit:
- Over 200 flashcards with prefixes, root/base words, suffixes, and multiple meaning words to build strong reading and spelling skills.
- Word lists with key orthographic concepts, so you have a quick guide to important word parts needed for strong vocabulary skills.
- Descriptions of 17 key concepts for building morphology/orthography skills.
- All flashcards and word lists have definitions, so your students actually remember how words are spelled.
- BONUS: Video tutorials with a quick-guide for using the toolkit to build reading and spelling skills.