 A number of children find spelling hard. There are ways you can help using everyday items, if it gets in the way of your child's enjoyment of reading and writing.
You can help your children by doing the following:
• Spell out words with fridge magnets or letter tiles from word games. Take some letters out and get your child to put the right ones back in the right places.
• Play games using lists of words. Have your child put them in alphabetical order using the first letter of a word (e.g. cat, fat, hat, mat and sat). Or your child can do this by the second letter (e.g. bag, beg, big, bog and bug).
• You can also play word-finding games. Give your child old newspapers or magazines, get them to highlight or draw a circle round every word that ends with ed, or every word beginning with p. Think out harder games as your child learns more.
• Draw or cut out pictures of things that have only one letter different (like pen and pin) to help them get used to how different vowels (a,e,i,o,u) work.
• Give a mirror to your child so he/she can see how their mouth moves when saying letters that can easily get mixed up when they write them down, like m and w, or p and g.
• Think up games to help your child see the difference between words like tap and tape or hop and hope where the last letter changes the way you say the whole word.
• Have them to play at rearranging letters to make other words (anagrams) out of their name, or other words they know.
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