Learning & Teaching 

As mentioned earlier in the year, our Grade 3-6 students learn spelling rules and morphology through the Spelling Mastery program.

Spelling Mastery is an effective, research-proven spelling program that teaches students the strategies they need to become successful, life-long spellers. Spelling Mastery helps students to understand the relationship between sounds, word parts and spelling patterns and encourages them to become proficient writers.

Through Spelling Mastery, students learn to spell in three ways: 

1. Students learn words using a phonemic approach. This sound-symbol method teaches students predictable spellings for different sounds. 

2. Students learn using a whole-word approach. This whole-word method teaches students common, irregularly-spelled words. For example, words like friend, answer and people, whose spellings can’t be figured out. 

3. Students learn rules about how to put different word parts together. These word parts are all called morphographs. Once they have learned to spell a few morphographs, students can mix them up to spell many words. They also learn the rules of putting morphographs together.

How can you assist your child? 

Your child will be explicitly taught spelling strategies during lessons at school. Spelling Mastery advocates that there is no necessity for them to learn spelling words as part of their homework. 

But, if you would like to do more… 

• Make spelling fun!
• Play spelling games on the iPad
• Play games like Junior Scrabble > Scrabble
• Play eye-spy, hangman

Use sight words for spelling, but only after reading is automatic