As I sat down today to help my ten year old daughter learn her list of ten spellings I pondered this question. Schools teach phonics so well and phonics schemes are mostly built upon the research and evidence bank of effective retrieval practice. Schools are so much more aware of retrieval practice now and over the last 5 or so years we have begun to understand long and short term memory much more and strategies for retaining information have found their way into the classroom. I have observed many retrieval sessions over the last 2 years in classrooms, revision sessions at the start of a maths lesson, a weekly or termly review of learning, lessons that link to learning last year or last month, all of which help children to embed their learning into their long term memory. And yet, when teaching spelling, we still give children a list of ten words, ask them to memorise them for a test in a few days time and that is that. We forget everything we know about the human brain and memory when we do this. If we think for a moment about phonics when we teach children the building blocks of reading and think about the number of times children must be exposed to each phoneme and grapheme during Reception and year 1, the number of times we show the grapheme and say the sounds and the number of times we ask them to recall the phoneme or grapheme, we can see why their new learning is embedded into their long term memory and they quickly become readers. I find it difficult to understand why similar principles are not applied when teaching spelling. I honestly believe that schools could revolutionise their teaching of spelling by:

1. Spending time actually teaching new spelling patterns

2. Reviewing spelling patterns at least weekly but ideally 3 times a week

3. Repeatedly exposing children to tricky words that don’t follow any spelling patterns just like we would in year 1.

A few years ago when I began thinking about this we removed weekly lists of words and spelling tests in the school where I work. We decided to use the time taken for testing lists for actual teaching of spelling and we split the time up into 3 short sessions over the week. We focussed on teaching and revising spelling patterns and exposure to tricky words. We monitored it closely over years, testing spelling ages regularly. The outcome… as we thought, spelling improved. How could it not with actual teaching going on. But more than that, the impact on writing was as significant. Children became much more independent in their written work, able to choose to use and write with ease tier 3 vocabulary with no fear of error.

So schools, please I urge you, look to your phonics schemes when considering the teaching of spelling. Let’s make the ten word lists and weekly tests a thing of the past.

‘I did what I knew how to do and now that I know better, I do better’ Maya Angelou