SPELLING

Objective

The purpose of these activities is to provide guidelines for the parents to scaffold children’s language learning of spelling with education apps.
For beginner learners, both their phonemic awareness skills and hands-on activities are introduced to develop their spelling skills.
The learning activities are divided into 4 sessions according to Cope and Kalantzis’ (2015) Learning by Design framework.

Materials

Resources

SESSION 1 - EXPERIENCING/SITUATED PRACTICE

Duration - 30 mins (variable)

In the first session, when using educational apps such as Endless Wordplay, parents can guide the children to tap and hold letters in the screen, hearing the sounds of “Alphabot” and place them in the word in the correct order.
In this app, each level has three rhyming words (such as “map”, ”lap” and ”nap”) appearing successively; after children spell them, there’s a short animation with a sentence using the words they just learned in context (“The map on my lap vanished during my nap”). The words increase in length and sentences become more complicated as levels proceed.
During this session, parents can discuss with children the relationship between sound and spelling. For instance, parents can discuss with children and ask:
- How does this letter usually sound?
- What is in the beginning and the end part of each word?
- What is in the middle of these words?
- What is the pattern you can find in these words?

SESSION 2 - CONCEPTUALISING/OVERT INSTRUCTION

Duration - 30 mins (variable)

During the second session, after children have some initial impressions about spelling in the educational apps, parents can guide the child to generalise some spelling rules from their practice in the app.
In this session, parents can encourage children to break the words they want to spell into their individual sounds and draw the children’s attention to any patterns or groups in the word, making links to the phonics they’ve been taught.
Parents can ask children to over-pronounce the words that are not so clearly pronounced (such as -ed in skipped or liked) and write it down.
For the words they are not sure about, children may write them in an inventive way. Then the parents can provide a correct form and scaffold children to remember how to spell.

SESSION 3 - ANALYSING/CRITICAL FRAMING

Duration - 30 mins (variable)

During the third session, parents can scaffold a deep analysis of the spelling activities they have practiced in the educational app with children. Parents can guide them to do some reflection and critical thinking.
Here is a useful Website App as Spelling Resources to be deployed in this session. Parents can flexibly choose from the resources and design questions for children to think. Parents can discuss with the children:
- Which letter is missing in this word?
- What does the word start with?
- What are the end blends in these words?
- What is the pattern of the positions of vowels and consonants?
In this session, it is essential to develop children’s phonemic awareness of the sounds and symbols.

SESSION 4 - APPLYING/TRANSFORMED PRACTICE

Duration - 30 mins (variable)

In the fourth session, parents can direct the children to relate their spelling skills to real-life affairs, and scaffold them to apply the skills to develop their reading and writing ability.
Parents can practice spelling with children at home, on the way to school, at the grocery store, in conversations over the dinner table, and so on. They can reinforce learning by asking children to spell the words orally or sometimes write out the spelling words on paper.
Parents can help children avoid confusion about some irregular and unconventional spelling.
Parents can help children to reduce their spelling errors by proofreading to build a reliable and responsible self-image from the early years.

Contributor: QLL

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