Spelling

Our Intent

At St Botolph’s, we want every child to have confidence and independence in their spelling abilities so that they can be creative and confident writers. Learning to spell is important for writing and reading. Regardless of their starting point, our consistent and progressive teaching will provide the children with the knowledge and the skills they need. While we are aware that spelling is not a measure of intelligence, doing poorly in spelling can affect a child’s performance in other aspects of the curriculum so we are being active in ensuring that every child achieves their potential and have strategies in place to achieve this.

Policy and Key Documents

The Teaching of Spelling

Read Write Inc. Spelling is a 15 minute programme that is taught for Years 2 to 6, twice a week. Following on from Read, Write Inc Phonics, it provides timetabled units of work for each year groups, based on a regime of rapid-fire daily sessions. Whilst we are loyal to the programme that we teach, as a school, we have included additional activities that meet the needs of our children.

The Spelling Activities:

• Speed Spell – reviewing prior learning
• Spelling Zone – using a short video to teach the spelling rule
• Dots and Dashes – to understand how the word has been made
• Rapid Recap – reviewing learning
• Word changers – adding a suffix or prefix
• Four-in-a-row – spelling from memory
• Choose the right word – applying their knowledge when reading sentences
• Dictation – applying their knowledge when writing sentences
• Jumping red and orange words – learning to spell words that do not follow spelling rules

As a school, we have included the following activities within the Spelling timetable (for KS2):

• Handwriting – looking at how the words look and are joined
• Dictionary work – looking at the meaning of certain words
• Mini test – this will be at the end of the unit and acts as a self-assessment opportunity

Common Exception Words

Common exception words are everyday words that break the phonic rules taught at school. Whilst these words will always be part of each child’s common vocabulary, they will eventually cease to be ‘exception words’ when the child understands the rules behind their pronunciation and spelling.

Common exception words are important because they are just that: common. They are words that appear frequently in texts and that help readers understand what they are reading. To access even the simplest texts, children need to be able to read these word, and they will certainly want to use it in their own compositions.

At St Botolph’s these words are taught through our Read, Write Inc Phonics and Spelling sessions and during our English lessons, we highlight and pay attention to the words during texts that we are reading.

Below are the lists of common exception words that we expect the children to be able to read and spell, broken down into year groups.