“Hi Ross and Phi. I’m after a bit of advice on how best to deliver editing lessons for spellings. I often find that these lessons don’t go so well as children struggle to find words they have spelled wrong in their own writing. How would you teach this skill and what resources do you think are best to help children do their corrections independently?”
This is a great question! I’ve tried to provide some advice below.
1. I would break proof-reading for spelling down into three component parts and devote as many days to it as you feel you need to.
- Start by proof-reading for common words only (I’ll leave this to your professional judgement; you can give out resources for the 10, 100, 1000 most common words).
- Once you’re happy with that, I would then move on to checking “our class’ tricky words“. For this session(s), you will want to create a word mat of all the words your class typically struggles with. It can be useful to flick through some of their books prior to making your word mat.
- Finally, children can correct their temporary spellings. Hopefully, at the beginning of the year, you modelled to your class how they can use temporary spellings. This is when we know we want to use a word but we are not sure how to spell it conventionally. You write down the sounds you can hear in the word (so we can read it) and put a circle around it. The children are then given these proof-reading sessions to look up the conventional spelling. They cross out their temporary spelling and write the conventional spelling above. If you haven’t taught your children to do this, you’ll need to do it in reserve. They’ll have to look through their manuscripts with their friends and circle any ‘unsure’ spellings.
- If you’ve decided you really want to make spelling a particular priority for a certain class writing project, it might take you anywhere between 3-7 sessions to work through this structure. This leads nicely onto point two.
2. Don’t move on until you’re happy that everyone has done their best proof-reading.
- You may well need to devote multiple sessions to spelling. For children whose manuscripts you have seen and are happy with on any given day, they can work on their personal projects, this frees you up to work with a group(s) of children who might need some extra TLC from you. For example, on the first day of checking for common words, most of my class made their corrections. However, I have a small group of pupils who are still working their way through. The next day, I will meet with that group to continue our spelling work while the rest of the class can have personal writing project time (see here for more on setting up personal project writing).
3. Model how you proof-read for spellings as part of your daily mini-lessons.
- It’s important that you model how to use word mats and other spelling resources as part of your mini-lessons. You need to show children how writers proof-read and what you expect them to do during that day’s writing time. Putting some of your writing (full of the sorts of spelling errors your children make) under a visualiser and showing the children how you are proof-reading it is invaluable.
4. Don’t use dictionaries!
- When correcting their temporary spellings, don’t ask the children to use dictionaries to look up their words. The problem with this is you need to know how to spell the word to look it up in the first place. Dictionaries are designed to look up the definitions of words – not their spellings. Instead, give children access to tablets or laptops – where they can type in their spelling on Google. It’ll often come back with ‘did you mean: …‘ and give a definition for the word too.
- You can also give children access to smart speakers. Children can then simply say “spell: tyrannosaurus rex” and the nice Siri man will say the word and then spell it out one letter at a time very slowly. Finally, you should give children access to electronic spell checkers [LINK] and/or ACE spelling dictionaries [LINK].
5. Always celebrate the amount of proof-reading children have achieved.
- It’s important to celebrate your best proof-readers. This way, children don’t see making corrections as a bad thing – but rather is something that great writers do. For example, you can ask children to count up the number of proof-reads they were able to find that day and give a prize to your best proof-reader.
- This is also about being optimistic and realistic. They are young developing writers. Even professional writers and publishers will pay professional proof-readers to spot their deviations from conventions. Even then, many ‘errors’ go through to final publication. For example, professional proofreaders catch only around 80% of non-word errors and 66% of word errors [LINK].
6. Proof-reading for spelling can’t replace the explicit teaching of spelling.
- As writers, not all of us are great spellers. That means we have to become great proof-readers. However, proof-reading can’t replace teaching children about spelling through explicit spelling instruction. I’ve attached a link to our spelling provision checklist. Check it out and see whether your approach to teaching spelling aligns with best practice [LINK].
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