Common Exception Words

Helping Your Child with Spelling

Children can find writing a real challenge; they need encouragement, support and praise for their efforts. You can best support them by encouraging them to write on every possible occasion, praising their efforts and, importantly, by letting them see you writing whenever possible. You can play word games with them (e.g. I spy, Find the word puzzles), you can also discuss interesting or new words.

Here are some of the strategies that will help your child become a confident and accurate speller:

·        Sounding words out: breaking the word down into phonemes (e.g. c-a-t, sh-e-ll) Many words cannot be sounded out so other strategies are needed;

·        Using the Look, say, cover, write, check strategy: look at the word and say it out loud, then cover it, write it and check to see if it is correct. If not, highlight or underline the incorrect part and repeat the process;

·        Dividing the word into syllables, say each syllable as they write the word (e.g. re-mem- ber);

·        Using mnemonics as an aid to memorising a tricky word e.g. people: people eat orange peel like elephants.

Common Exception Word List – click on the link below to learn your Year 1 spellings.

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