Techniques for Mastering Spelling Lists

My daughter is only in first grade. The spelling words that she is being tested on appear to be at a very high level. Whatever happened to having children spell words like "the," "dog," "that" and "when"? She is being asked to spell such words as "armadillo," "porpoise," "bulldozer," "yucca" and "marsupial." My child comes close to failing many of these tests. How can I help her? -- Spelling Problems
Answer: How to teach spelling is one of the best researched topics in education. Unfortunately, spelling is not always taught in a way that really helps children learn to spell. The majority of words in a spelling program should be those that are most frequently used by students in their writing. This is especially true at the primary level and gives students a solid reason for learning how to spell. More difficult words can be presented later on.
Your daughter's teacher is probably selecting words that the children are meeting in their reading. It's fine to include a difficult word each week in a spelling list as a challenge. In fact, it's great if there is more than one spelling list so all the children in a classroom are working with words they need to learn to spell. Find out from the teacher how your daughter will ever learn to spell basic words. You might discover that you will have to teach these words to your child.
No matter what words children are being asked to spell, there is a well-researched way to learn to spell that should improve your daughter's test scores. As soon as she brings home the weekly spelling list, give her a pretest over the words. Have her correct the test as you spell each word aloud. This will focus her attention on how the word is spelled correctly. Then she should follow these steps in learning how to study the words that were misspelled:
1. She should look at the word carefully and say it.
2. Next, have her cover the word and write it.
3. Then she should check that she wrote the wordcorrectly.
4. These three steps should be repeated three more times or until the word is spelled correctly before she goes on to the next word to be learned.
Just studying the words one night is probably not going to be sufficient to teach your daughter to spell all the words correctly. She will need to work with the missed words in the way described above for several nights.