Spelling Shed teaching curriculum
It is nearly five years since we launched Spelling Shed and it has since become the number one selling spelling app in several countries.
Since our inception, we have continued to evaluate the latest spelling research and collaborate with schools and educators in order to develop our spelling programme.
At our core, we remain steadfast in our beliefs that repeated practice, short-term retrieval and small-step goal achievement is key to spelling improvement and this is why our technology-driven games remain in place.
The significant changes can be seen across our curriculum of lesson planning, teaching resources and printable handouts.
Each lesson…
- includes more features to enhance the teaching and learning in your setting.
- is designed to be flexible to fit within the variable timetables that schools have.
- has main teaching inputs, which can then be followed up with additional activities that can be carried out immediately after the input during an extended session or revisited throughout the week in order to consolidate the learning further.
- has elements of the key areas below embedded in its core.
Orthography
“Orthography is how patterns of letters are used to make certain spoken sounds in a language.”
In the new Spelling Shed lessons, students will continue to build on the firm foundations built whilst studying phonics in their early years of education. They will continue to break down spellings into the smallest units of sound and cluster them into syllables in order to read and write words efficiently.
Through adult-led discussion and investigation children will become more secure in their knowledge of English orthography based on the frequency and position of the sounds within words.
Morphology
“Morphology describes how words are structured into subcomponents to give meaning.”
Children will study words; word parts; their meanings and how this affects spelling.
There are lessons throughout the curriculum that consolidate children’s knowledge of common morphemes such as root formations, prefixes and suffixes.
Etymology
“Etymology describes the origins of words, which can lead to certain patterns of spelling.”
Most lessons in the curriculum include an etymology element that allows educators to teach the children about the origin of the words that they are learning about.
Children will be able to see how the English language has, over time, borrowed and integrated words and spellings from a range of source languages. For example, the latinate verbs which follow Latin prepositions in English words such as: -act (do), -pute (think) or -opt (choose).
What does research say?
Research has shown that spelling and reading build and rely on the same mental representation of a word. Knowing the spelling of a word makes the representation of it sturdy and accessible for fluent reading.
(Snow et al., 2005)
” “As an individual repeatedly associates phonemes to graphemes and larger units of language (i.e., orthographic mapping), these associations become ingrained in the memory and easier to retrieve with automaticity.
(Ehri 1998, 2005)
” “With practice, individuals begin to automatically connect words’ pronunciations, meanings, and spellings and this allows an individual’s speed and accuracy to improve.” (Perfetti 2007, Ehri 2014) This allows the cognitive resources (i.e., working memory) to be allocated to reading comprehension.
(Fletcher, Lyon, Fuchs, & Barnes, M.A; 2019)
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