We know that becoming a good speller involves more than simply memorizing words and passing tests. Both in and out of school students will need to spell and write many more words than they can possibly memorize. It is critical for them to know how to approach words that they have not learned for spelling tests. Our instruction is designed to develop knowledgeable, independent, and thoughtful spellers who can apply the rules and generalizations they are learning to both reading and writing.
The goal of our foundational skills instruction is to provide students what they need to be independent, fluent readers and writers. We know that students will need to have phonological awareness to be able to hear and manipulate sounds in words as well as understand the sound-spelling relationship in order to match the spelling pattern to the sounds they are encoding. Because there are many sounds that are represented by more than one spelling, we focus on fostering thoughtful spellers who approach words strategically, using what they have learned, so that they can read and spell many words.
Guided Spelling is also a strand in Being a Reader small-group instruction. Students spell decodable words and high-frequency words with teacher support. Spelling practice coordinated with on-level reading strengthens both decoding and encoding. The purpose of guided spelling is to support the students in becoming strategic spellers rather than to test their knowledge of individual words. It is an opportunity for the students to apply their growing spelling-sound knowledge to writing.
Students learn to spell high-frequency words as they engage in a read-spell-read routine in shared reading and small-group instruction. This helps focus students’ attention to the left to right sequence of letters and develops their automaticity in reading connected texts.