Chip, cheap, ship, sheep - remembering the spelling

Words that sound similar, especially to learners of English, can be a nightmare to spell.

A colleague in Algeria wrote that his young students mix up the spelling of the words chip, cheap, ship and sheep. If you're a native speaker of English you might think that the only problem here is the two different ways of spelling the long e sound in cheap and sheep. Otherwise the sounds tell you how to spell them, don't they?. But if you're a learner of English as a foreign language, you may well not be able to hear or produce the two different vowel sounds in ship and sheep. And the same difficulty is common with the different consonant sounds in ship and chip. So that's where phonics falls down for learners of English.

So let me try to help.

If we can't rely on sound for spelling these words, perhaps we can find something in the meaning to help. But that's usually easier with longer words. So I had to get a bit creative with these.

Linking the meaning with a photographic image of the letter.

Using synonyms to remember those two vowels

Using the word shape linked to the meaning 

Using drawn images to remember the vowels

You'll notice that:

• there are lots of different ways to help learners remember
• visual images stick in most people's memories
• linking meaning with spelling gives learners a hook to hang the spelling on
• this is a great way to differentiate between two (or more) similar words that cause spelling problems
• I can't draw! It's true I'm rather embarrassed about these drawings - particularly those sheep! - but in fact here I think it's an advantage because it makes them funnier and it shows people (teachers and learners) that they don't have to be artists to be able to do this. I'm most certainly not!
  

Teachers! Parents! People who find spelling hard! 

I invite you to try it yourselves with words your learners / your children / you can't spell or confuse. 

Start by identifying the problem part in the word. Think about the whole word shape and think about the shape of those tricky letters, but always think about the meaning too and try to make a link. Can you make a visual link between the spelling and the meaning? 

Try out some different ideas - just the thinking and drawing will help memory, so it works best if the person who is having the spelling difficulty does it himself or herself or you do it together. The images can then be displayed as a reminder if necessary - but remove the display as soon as possible so the memory needs to do a bit of work. 

Please share your images with us in my Flickr group:  https://www.flickr.com/groups/spellingimages/

And please, feel free to tell others about this Flickr group, this blog, this idea and/or my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/thespellingpage

Looking forward to seeing your pictures!

Johanna

 .

Learning to spell Definitely

It's definately  defnetly certainly got to be one of the most misspelt words - definitely.

By the time you've read this post, you'll definitely never misspell it again. But how DO you learn those words that refuse to be learnt.

Here's my advice:

Don't rely on sound alone. Depending on your accent, this word definitely might sound a bit like "def-nut-lee". In fact you really can't hear how that vowel between n and t is spelt, so that's not going to help you. Going on sound alone it could be a, e, i, o or u.

Try more than one way to remember. At least one of them will work for you. And if you can use more than one of those methods, you can check that you're right.

Here are some ways to remember the spelling of definitely.

1) Build it up. This is my favourite way (and how I personally learnt to spell definitely).

finite  (easy to spell)

de + finite = definite

definite + ly = definitely

_______________

2) Think about the error you usually make (people often write this word with an 'a') and kill it!

There's definitely no 'a' in definitely.

_______________

3) Look at the shape. If you follow this blog you'll know I do a lot of work with word shapes. But they don't work so well with long words and not at all with vowels. So here's another way. Look at the combination of letters below. What does the overall shape remind you of? You might need to squint!

eiie

Does it look like a car? Or an armchair? Or something else? Remember those are the vowels in this word:

definitely

_______________

4) Play a game: how many words can you find in the word definitely? The letters must be consecutive not anagrams. So fin is fine but fit isn't.

definitely

_______________

5) Relate part of the spelling to part of another word that you can spell.

I've definitely finished

_______________

6) Colour your vowels. Decide on a colour for each vowel. For example:

a - grey

e - green

i - bright red

o  - yellow

u - blue

(the names of the letters sound like the colours)

Then write the word:

definitely

Download resources for coloured vowels here.

_______________

7) Check you've got it. Use my Look Say Cover Write and Check chart to test yourself. Download it from here: or read more about it here.

_______________

Got it? Any other ways to remember? Go ahead and share them.

Vowel patterns - Three in a Row Vowels Activity

Learners seem to have many more problems with spelling vowel sounds than consonant sounds. This isn't really surprising as English has only five vowel letters for about 20 vowel sounds, including diphthongs. (For consonants there are 21 letters and 24 different sounds, plus silence.) So vowels need to be used in combination (digraphs and trigraphs) to make certain sounds. Also, unstressed vowels are often pronounced with a schwa /ə/ (like the last syllable of teacher), regardless of the spelling. Added to this, some languages give much less importance to vowels - Arabic and Hebrew, for example - and learners may not realise the precision needed in English.

So, what to do? How can we help learners spell vowel sounds accurately? Here is just one activity from my book which helps learners to notice and practise vowel digraphs.

I hope you find it useful. Feedback always appreciated. 

22.4

Three in a Row Vowels

Aim: To give practice with vowel patterns. (See pages 131 and 135 of book for rationale)

Materials needed: Pencils. For each group of four learners: One game board — enlarged to A3 if possible; two different coloured sets of cards, also enlarged to A3 and cut - these are available on The Spelling Blog downloads page.

Activity:

1.       Learners work in groups of four (or up to six if necessary). Each group has two teams. Give each group two different coloured sets of vowel pattern cards — one for each of their teams. Also give them one game board. The cards are shuffled and placed in a pile, face down, in front of each team.

2.       One team turns up the first card. They make a word containing that vowel or pattern that matches one of the categories on the game board. They write the word in pencil under the pattern and place the card on the game board on top of the relevant category.

3.       The next team turns up one of their cards and does the same. The game continues until one team gets three cards in a row, horizontally, vertically or diagonally. So as well as trying to make a row of three, learners need to stop the opposing team from winning a row.

4.       To play again, learners need to rub out the words they have written on the cards.

Variations: Boards and cards can be laminated for reuse. Then learners write their words with a non-permanent pen (e.g. overhead projector pen) and these can be washed off after the game.

You may want to set a time limit for the creation of each word.

At the end of the game, everyone writes personalised sentences for the words they used to help them remember the spellings within a sentence.

For an easier version of this game, each team spreads out all their cards in front of them and they can choose the pattern they use to make a relevant word.

You could use this idea to make your own game with different spelling patterns or different topics.

Printable spelling worksheets to download free

Printables
I've recently created a new tab on The Spelling Blog for Downloads. There you will find three worksheets from my book, Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners, that you can download and print absolutely free.

1) The multisensory Look Say Cover Write and Check chart has been popular. It's been available for a while, but this version is easier to download. It's far more than the usual four-column table (that I always think learners could just draw in their books). This one really teaches them to learn spellings by guiding them to use several different approaches at the same time. And there's a cover card too that reminds them of the approach.

2) World Cup Vowels is an activity to get learners to really notice vowels in words (in this case, country names). It is especially useful for Arabic speakers who are often rather cavalier in their use (or non-use) of English vowels. All within a football (soccer) context.

3) The third one is completely new to The Spelling Blog, but also concerns vowels. It is a system for colouring vowels to make them visually salient in difficult words. Full instructions are in the book, but here I make coloured versions available (so your learners don't have to colour them in!). These include a classroom poster and bookmarks for learners.

And more ...
Still to come (early April):

• Two more printable worksheets
• Audio files of some texts and activities from the book that I think could be useful
• Some PowerPoint presentations about features of spelling that may be useful in class.

Dropbox
By the way, I am able to make these available using my favourite webtool, Dropbox. Dropbox allows you to automatically save all your documents online (safely) so they are backed up and you can open and edit them anywhere that you have internet access. It also synchronises your documents if you work on more than one computer. And I've recently discovered that I can host files there that I want to share publicly, such as the downloads above. All this and, guess what, it's free. Well, it's free for 2GB, but you can 'earn' up to 8GB by referring other people. So if you like the sound of it, use this link: http://db.tt/Om5BS9b , to investigate and download Dropbox. That means that you will get an extra 250MB of Dropbox space and so will I. The more space I have, the more activities I can make available here on The Spelling Blog. (You only get the extra space if you use the link above)

Johanna