Teach a Child to Spell in 3 Steps

Single word spelling involves three primary base skills:

• Visual Skills: The recognition of the alphabet symbol and the conversion of this symbol into a sound (ie: Not letter name).
• Auditory Skills: The phonemic awareness skill of blending three sounds (or phonemes) together to form a word.
• Fine Motor Skills: The formation or handwriting of the symbols.

The following example illustrates the establishment of early spelling ability. To spell the word ‘sun’ a student must:

Apply phonemic awareness skills and identify the initial sound ‘s’, retrieve the symbol ‘s’ from the visual memory and then form or write the letter ‘s’.

The student must again apply phonemic awareness skills and identify the medial sound ‘u’, retrieve the ‘u’ from the visual memory and then write the letter ‘u’.

The final step requires the phonemic awareness skill of identifying the final ‘n’ sound then retrieving from the visual memory the ‘n’ symbol and finally write the ‘n’.

Once this spelling process has been rehearsed the students can typically spell the word automatically and often through the application of letter names ‘s-u-n’. Students will typically read better than they will spell. This is because the recognition of the words (i.e. reading) is typically much easier than the reproduction of the letter sound correspondences to formulate the words. It is common for students to require repeated targeted spelling practice, in order to master skills.