IntroductionThis document attempts to put a practical class based framework around the phonics pedagogy outlined in the school’s document “The Teaching of Phonics”.Please note that this document is written for all children bar those on the SEN register whose provision is met through IEPs and individual targeted work mainly undertaken by teaching assistants in both key stages.

Groupings for SpellingsThere are 3 major groups of spellers in the school and these have sub-groups within them.

The groups are as follows:1. The Phonics Phase2. The Phonic Consolidation Phase3. Post Phonic Phase

Each group should be treated as different in their own right and the teaching and learning that ensues in each group will be unique to each phase.

1. The Phonics Phase

These children are all “taught” phonics in a seemingly didactic manner. Whilst purists might wish to see a more “emergent” or child-centred approach, the rationale behind the teacher-driven lesson hinges on two areas. The early phases of writing do not always lend themselves to a natural progression through the phonics pyramid, but also there is the simple pragmatic element of how one teaches phonics in a class of 30 reception age children. The systematic teaching of phonics in this way provides children with the tools they need to become effective writers and latterly true “emergent” spellers.

Within this phase there are three distinct groups:

i Letter sounds: These are a group of early learners who are seeking to gain an understanding of the basic letter sounds

There are then two groups which have very different foci and we should not confuse the two as they are seeking to fulfil very different things

ii Blending Skills: These children have moved on from initial letter sounds and are at a stage where they are blending sounds such as -st, -tr, cl, etc. I am rapidly moving to a position where I am wondering whether we need to “teach” each sound. We need to look into how easy children find it to blend (and segment, where

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necessary) the letter sounds into these initial blends. We may be “teaching” something and spending inordinate amounts of time on an area of phonics which is relatively intuitive for a child with a good secure grasp of phonetic letter sounds. Therefore at present the school teaches the principles of blending to the children and leaves them to blend letter sounds as they arise rather then teaching each separate sound in individual lessons.

iii Vowel Sounds: The group of phonetic sounds that probably need to be taught are the short and long vowel sounds. There is little hope of a child will be able to blend “ow” to make a long “o” sound without explicit instruction and even less likely to create a long “i” sound out of the letters –igh. These therefore need to be taught in the same manner as the letter sounds and need to be seen as the key building blocks in phonetic learning. The other group of words that would fall into this category would be the “special h’s” e.g. -ch, -th etc which again create a new sound beyond simple blending when used together.

2. The Phonic Consolidation Phase

This group are those children who have a secure grasp of all the phonic sounds listed above. They can blend and segment with an element of consistency; they know letter sounds and know most if not all of the vowel sounds. There is little point “teaching” these children spelling because they have the building blocks for them to engage with spelling patterns and letter forms from their own work which is a more powerful form of learning. Children working at this level will show a good phonetic understanding in their written work and much of their writing will be understandable but there will be clear patterns of spelling errors through their literacy books. Many of these will relate to regular patterns which can then be collated and learnt. (see below)

The rationale behind learning spelling within the context of their own writing is two fold:

1. If children are learning words from their own spellings then by definition they are hitting the words they need to learn because these are the words in their own vocabulary.

2. The problem for these children is not that they do not know how to spell the “beak” (on a bird) it is just that they don’t know which rule to employ in this context. The decision to be made is between spelling the word as “beke”, “beek”, or “beak” all of which are phonetically correct but only one is right in context. This problem becomes even more acute when heteronyms (one of a group of words with identical spellings but different meanings and pronunciations) are used. In the sentence “the car’s breaks/brakes did not work” the child has two “correct” spellings to choose from. In the past we have tried to teach these out context and separate from their own writing, this is fundamentally flawed as a teaching philosophy.

3. There may also be consistent foibles in spelling patterns that are unique to them as individuals that they should be seeking to address; e.g. the child who spells words with the suffix – “shun”, or the child who adds “t” to verbs instead of “-ed”. These can be tackled swiftly and effectively at this level through individual engagement with the child through the errors in their own writing.

A word on context – The two points above demonstrate the role of context. It does not mean that the learning of the spelling has to be done in the context of the sentence or the piece of

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writing. In fact I don’t know how you would do this at all. The children need to log the spelling, record it noting the pattern of the letters (see point 2 below) and move on.

The key to this phase in a child’s spelling development is that they are seeing two things occurring in their learning:

1. They understand the correct phonetic spelling through the context (see point 2 above)

2. They are consolidating the vowel (and other spelling) patterns. It is this latter element which will prove to be the most powerful in the long term. As we have seen (see the document – The Teaching of Phonics) good spellers are able to determine and recognise patterns and sequences of letters as being correct. So the child who spells train as “trian” has a double problem. Firstly, he can’t spell train, but much more importantly he has not seen that the majority of words in English do not use the “ia” combination of letters. The deeper learning occurs when a child starts to build up these patterns of correct word formation. Similarly the child who writes “walkt” has obviously not understood that the greatest chance of the spelling being correct would be an –ed on the end.

If this is where the children need to head towards then it would seem obvious that they should focus on the words with the most common and the most basic spelling patterns. This leads us back to the phonics pyramid, the children should first engage with the short and long vowel sounds and the “special h” words. So even in this (seeming) post-phonic phase the teacher and the child should continue to use the phonics pyramid to drive the spelling patterns and formations that the children should engage with.

In a practical sense the children should be given opportunity to see spelling patterns in their own work and pick these out. Depending on the maturity of the child or the complexity of the pattern this may be child initiated or teacher led. They should focus on the area of weakness and this should (if possible) be a pattern in the phonics pyramid, or a common standard spelling pattern e.g. -ed , -tion, etc. These should be logged so the child can see the pattern clearly.

To avoid overload I would expect that no child should be focusing on any more than 3 patterns at any one time and these should form targets that should be placed in their Literacy book along with their normal writing targets. As they conquer each one then the target drops off and a new spelling replaces it. This provides a record of progression for the teacher, and more importantly for the child.

The question remains; “What do we do with the spellings once the child has collated them?” I do believe that simply focusing on the pattern and its construction may be powerful enough. Research has shown that the teaching of spelling generally falls down because many of the strategies fail to focus on this single central aspect. Having said that I would still see nothing wrong with the child using these and other patterns for their spelling tests as it consolidates a bespoke pattern that is individually targeted.

We need to avoid the superficial elements of consolidation such as taking the word and writing it in to a fresh sentence which I suspect adds little for the child in terms of learning the specific spelling error. In truth 95% of the sentence they write will probably contain words they can spell already and the likelihood is the mass of words around the spelling pattern will probably detract from the key element which is for the child to focus in on correcting the specific error rather than the words around it. e.g. In the word “trian” the child needs to focus on the “ai” element of the spelling not the 12 words encompassing it within a sentence. The engagement with the pattern is key.

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Running alongside the collating of spelling patterns the child may well develop their own spelling lists of seemingly unrelated words which they have spelt wrong in their written work and which the teacher has subsequently corrected. These may form some of the words that they take home for the weekly spelling test. The key feature is that the child should increasingly take ownership of this process and seek to see these words as a personal challenge to be tackled. This engagement with their own spelling development needs to underpin the whole process and will ultimately determine the child’s success in this realm. The maintaining of the list by the child will allow them to be in control of the learning and also to track their own progress throughout the year as they successfully learn to spell the words correctly.

However… As children progress along this path they should soon be able to understand most, if not all of the major building blocks in the English spelling system. There will come a point where the only pattern a child (or a teacher) can find in their work might be one as obscure as “the -eigh sound” which makes a long “a” sound in the word “eight” or “neighbour”. Once the child is at this level it seems pointless to categorise the spellings in the same form as in previous phases, especially as those two words, along with “neigh” are the only common ones I can think of that use that sound. The child has reached a point where to collate patterns from their own work would prove a source of frustration because their writing is unlikely to contain a plethora of spellings that relate to any one rule. This becomes a watershed and the child must move onto the next stage.

3. The Post-Phonic Phase The features in this phase are that the child has reached a point where they are both phonetically strong and also have a good grasp as to how the long and short vowel sounds are used in specific words; e.g. they write “train” as opposed to “trayn”, even though the latter is phonetically correct. To this end the majority of their work will be spelt correctly and there will be few words that need to be corrected. Most of these may well be words that are phonetically irregular or complex in their construction. It is probably worth noting that this phase probably comes sooner than we might think, and would certainly apply to some of the more able children in Year 2.

At this point there needs to be a definite shift in the role of the teacher and this is very significant. The previous two phases have both focused on the child’s work as a source for spellings and the child has been instrumental in collecting and collating the patterns. At this point this is not feasible and the emphasis for the progression switches from the child to the teacher. Whereas the child may be working on “the –ai sound” and will be collecting words relating to this, the child will now be working on uncommon patterns and the emphasis will be on the teacher to supply related words and derive a meaningful context in which they can be learnt.

This can be facilitated through two teaching strategies. Whilst the latter is probably a progression on the former the likelihood is that the two will run in tandem with the teacher selecting the appropriate strategy for any given situation. 1. Providing Additional Words

The teacher may provide (or preferably encourage the child to explore for themselves) words with a similar spelling pattern. To be fair this may occur in the previous phases at times but in this phase this will be the predominant feature. The child might misspell “archaeology” using the prefix “ark” and then the teacher will encourage the child to explore other words with this spelling pattern.

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2. Providing Extension ActivitesLeading on (sometimes seamlessly) from the above the teacher may encourage the child to engage with the construction of words and their origin. For instance using the word above, the “arch” prefix in archaeology means several things: primary or main (as in arch enemy) supreme (as in archbishop) earlier or original (as in archaeology) and as a suffix, ruler or leader (as in matriarch/patriarch). The purpose here is two fold; firstly to drive home the pattern in the spelling but more importantly for the child to develop a deeper, richer love and appreciation of the English language. This phase should also include the additional word based activities found within the National Literacy Strategy; e.g. Understand that vocabulary changes over time e.g. through collecting words which have become little used and discussing why e.g. frock, wireless, Children should also study the roots of words and their derivatives from the Latin and the Greek developing a rich understanding of their literary heritage

What does this look like in classroom practice? I would see the child in this phase having their own “Dictionary” as in the previous two phases. The literacy Strategy still encourages children to “explore the full range of spelling conventions and rules” well into Key Stage 2 and I believe this is still an appropriate. The difference will be that the dictionary will have a larger element of words supplied by the teacher or words collected from arenas other than the child’s own writing. Within this there should be a place where children can record their findings on spelling origins, derivatives and vocabulary changes over time.

The real question in this phase relates to the learning of spelling within the context of a weekly spelling test. For me the jury is out at present on whether the children moving through this phase require a weekly spelling test. My own feeling is that in the early stages of the phase this may still be appropriate where the patterns and sounds are relatively common and familiar, however there will come a point where the teacher may find that the children are learning ever increasingly obscure words such as; architectural, archive, archaism and archipelago because they happened to spell “architect” wrong in their writing. This is of little value, especially as the child is unlikely to use any of these words in a subsequent piece of writing. Although to be fair, it could be argued that it would effectively consolidate the spelling of the prefix. What might be more beneficial is to move the child into an arena where they explore the derivation of the word and set this for homework.

The only other point to raise in the Post-Phonic phase is to keep tabs on the child who is generating few spellings because they are frightened to misspell words and therefore use a vocabulary outside of their comfort zone. Strategic marking and good word level teaching should root this out as a matter of course but where this does not occur this should be set as a target for the particular child and activities such as “Add a word Change a word” should replace the word-level exercises proposed above. Again to be fair this is not new the National Literary Strategy stated that children should;Define familiar words but within varying constraints, e.g within four words, then three words, then two then one and consider how to arrive at the best use of words for different purposes Use alternative words and expressions which are more accurate or interesting than the common words.

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Appendix 1: The Marking of Spelling

The debate as to how many spelling should the teacher highlight when marking a piece of written work is quite a vexed subject, but the following guidelines should be followed

DifferentiationAs a rule of thumb all children should have the same amount of spellings drawn out from each of their own pieces of work. This is because no matter what the academic ability of the child the marking and feedback should be targeted at the needs of the child. The child in Reception working at the phonic level may have two or three words to correct that relate to the specific phonic sound they are presently learning. The more able child in Year 6 may have the same number of spellings drawn from his or her work but they may well be the only words that are spelt wrong in the whole piece of the written work. To this end the spellings are self regulating and should tackle the simplest first leaving the more complex to another time.

Developing a Learning MindsetWhilst seeming like a slight contradiction of the above, we should not be frightened to mark work rigorously. Children should be a on a “learning” rather than “performance” orientation (Carol Dweck’s phrase) and therefore they should be in a mindset where they are delighted with the number of words for correction because they see themselves as learners rather then pupils seeking always to get everything right. Children in this robust form of mindset will make better progress in all forms of learning and spelling is no exception to this. We want children to be hungry to learn from their errors, and therefore they should respond positively to robust marking.

Self and Peer EditingA key feature of any form of writing is that the children should correct their own spelling prior to teacher marking. Working with children in the past year it has been clear that many errors in spelling relate to either, a concentration of the child on the text and narrative rather than the spelling and/or an element of laziness in writing. Both of these can be corrected when set in isolation at the end of the lesson if children are given time to proof read their work for spelling. This allows them to focus solely on spelling patterns for themselves, but more importantly stops teachers correcting spellings which will not impact greatly on the child’s progress.

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Appendix 2: Building blocks analogy

In working with Year 2 I came to see the acquisition of spelling as gaining a series of building blocks with which one can build up words. The larger the blocks the more effective the teaching and usefulness will be because the sounds, patterns and words learnt can be used in a multiplicity of contexts. As the child moves into Key Stage 2 there will be a lessening of the effectiveness of blanket “teaching” because the words become very “context specific” and because they are not major building blocks within the English language, they will have a lesser impact on the child’s spelling as a whole because the rules and patterns are less common.

So in the diagram the learning of Letter sounds will have a huge impact on a child’s ability to build up words because this is a fundamental building block for all words. The teaching of long and short vowel sounds will diminish in effectiveness because the sounds are not relevant to all words e.g. cvc words. By the time we get to the spelling pattern of –aeo found in the word “archaeology” we have reached a point where the learning of the pattern will have little impact on the child’s spelling as a whole because it so word specific.

This principle should drive the teaching and learning through the phases. Where the building blocks are large then a form of didactic teaching, with children collating their own spelling lists from their written work and consolidation either in further work or testing is duly appropriate. As the block diminish in size then these strategies become less effective and the teacher will have a greater input into the child’s progression, either by providing words or moving the children towards an exploratory approach relating to the derivation of words, the use of consolidation work and weekly tests should be closely monitored as to their effectiveness.

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