 | | Spelling | | During the first two to three weeks of school we learn the sounds of the (approximately) seventy phonograms in the English language. The sounds are learned in the order that they appear in words; for example, the 2-letter phoneme 'ou' has four sounds in English: proud, your, soup, couple. The 'ow' sound of ou in the word proud is the most common sound of ou. The idea is that a student will be able to focus mentally on the possible letter combinations that could be used for a word that they're not sure how to spell. If she wants to write the word tough, but can't spell it, she runs through the possibilities (uff, ough, uph, uf, etc.) until the right one (hopefully) "rings a bell."
My spelling lists are made up of words that have these sounds, so students will have to know whether, for example, a word on the 'aw' list is spelled with an 'au,' an 'aw,' an 'augh,' or an 'ough.'
I also teach the rules of spelling. (There are 29 of them, but we concentrate on the most useful.)
Etymology is examined as often as possible
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