Spelling Years 3 to 6 

St Joseph’s Spelling Years 3 to 6

A new Spelling Program has been introduced for Year Three to Year Six students and integrated into classroom instruction. This program covers spelling patterns, rules, irregular words, homophones, morphology, and etymology, drawing from Spelling Mastery.

Background on Spelling at St Joseph’s

In 2018, we introduced Spelling Mastery for Year Three to Year Six, as there was no consistent formal spelling program before then. Students initially responded well, with data showing at least 12 months of growth in spelling within six months and some achieving two years of growth. However, after this initial surge, progress plateaued to expected levels.

In recent years, our Naplan Spelling data has shown a gradual decline. Ongoing data analysis at St Joseph’s revealed that students were not consistently transferring their spelling knowledge from Spelling Mastery into their writing and reading. Since Spelling Mastery was taught as a separate lesson with students moving between different grades and teachers, it lacked integration into reading and writing sessions.                                    

The Need for a New Approach

Research highlights that oral language, reading, writing, and spelling are interconnected and should be integrated into English lessons. To address this, our staff developed a new Phonics/Spelling Scope and Sequence last year in response to our Naplan data. The new classroom-based spelling program will allow students to continuously apply and reinforce their learning within reading and writing tasks. The Spelling sessions will continue to take place on Mondays through Thursdays from 9:00 to 9:25 a.m.

Spelling lessons will be differentiated to meet the diverse needs of students, ensuring that all learners receive appropriate support and challenge, just as in other curriculum areas.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Amanda Jackson

Structured Literacy Leader

amandaj@sjmalvern.catholic.edu.au

Glossary

Phonemic/Spelling Patterns

This approach involves teaching students the letters for various sounds, such as au and aw make the /au/ sound.

Irregular words

This approach requires students to memorise the spelling of individual words that do not fit into spelling generalisations or patterns.

Morphemic

The morphemic approach teaches students to spell units- bases and affixes of words and to put them together to form words.