Thursday, August 16, 2012

How to correct bad spelling

Lets face it.  Spelling in the modern world is getting worse.   Even with spell checker, many times the student chooses a wrong word just because it looks right.  But they don't know the meaning of the word, so it doesn't fit into the sentence!

I came across an old book written in 1918, by David M. Roth

http://openlibrary.org/books/OL24648168M/Roth_memory_course?v=2

Here is a lesson about spelling, sometimes old can be good!

He takes some words that are commonly misspelled, and have the student practice them in a different way than we usually do.

There are two ways that we can do this:
First we take the word that has a letter that we don't usually hear:

Privilege:  The letter i people usually don't hear and spell it with an e.

So how do you practice spelling this?
You make the i bigger.

privilege  This is much easier when you are working with a pen rather than on computer,
Write the word this way five times. Then test yourself the next day, writing the word regular.
See if you can spell it correctly!

Another way is to make the i a different color.
privilege  this also works better when writing by hand.
Write it five times , test yourself the next day to see if you can spell it correctly.

If you are teaching in a class,
Have the student keep a personal spelling dictionary of words that the student has had trouble spelling.
Have the student practice spelling the word, using one of these techniques.

I'm in the process of reading this Memory Course, and as I have other insights, I'll write a post about them so you can use them for yourself and in your classroom.

Till next time,

Rachael Orbach
www.rachaelorbach.weebly.com




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice, Rachael. Thanks for sharing.

- Judih

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