Giving children the skills to become confident spellers has a huge impact across the curriculum – not only helping them approach their weekly spelling tests with ease, but importantly helping them make effective vocabulary choices in all of their writing. Here are some top tips from our resources to help.

Make the most of staff meetings

Use a staff meeting to review your school’s approach to teaching spelling with the free Spelling toolkit on Oxford Owl for School. The toolkit provides all the resources you need for a focused training session for all staff on developing the teaching of spelling in your school including:

• A handy presentation and facilitator notes to structure your training session
• Seven engaging videos and animations featuring literacy expert, James Clements
• Tasks to work through, with handouts and ideas for discussion

Log in or register for free to access all of these resources.

Support independent spelling

These top tips from Oxford Children’s Dictionaries to help children prepare for #TheBigSpell are a great way to help children spell independently.

• Try learning words in families. Word families are related to each other by spelling, grammar and meaning. When you know how to spell one member of the family, you can use it to help spell other words e.g. danger, dangerous, dangerously.
• Vowel sounds are tricky! For words like because and does, it can be easier to learn a rhyme. The sillier the better!
• Splitting words into syllables makes it easier to learn longer words e.g. bra-chi-o-sau-rus.
• Some words have silent letters – try to learn groups of these words together e.g. these words have a silent ‘h’: honour, hour, honest.
• Lots of words end in –able or –ible. A simple way to check this is to see if you can find a root word (a word that makes sense on its own). If you can find the root word use ‘able’, if can’t use ‘ible’ e.g. eatable and possible.

Find more tips on the Oxford Owl for Home blog.

Try a spelling programme

If you’re looking to free up some of your planning and marking time, a ready-made spelling programme may help. You can try this Nelson Spelling lesson for Year 2 for free.

Help parents with homework

For many children (and parents!) the weekly spelling test can be sometimes be a bit intimidating. So to help parents support their children at home, Oxford Owl for Home have put together a guide on  how children learn to spell at school and creative ways to help with spelling homework – perfect for your next school newsletter.