Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0311: Reprise: How do I teach spelling to 5th graders?

Episode Date: May 18, 2015

Today Timothy revisits the question on how to teach spelling to 5th graders, with some extra comments on how he would change his answer today. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Today we're representing episode 44 about teaching spelling to children. So some things I like about this episode are that I focus on teaching prefixes and suffixes, which are going to scale. There are certain parts of words that you'll see over and over and over, so it's good to know how to spell those. So every time you hear pre in a word, for example, you know to put that, to spell that p-R-E. So that's something handy that scales. But also something that was good here is teaching just a part of the word instead of the whole word. So this is extremely powerful. You're teaching just one syllable of the word and you're spelling that right.

And the rest of it is more likely to be correct. So if the student tries to focus on all eight letters in the word equally, that's going to be a lot more difficult than just focusing on spelling just three or four letters correctly. So that's a fairly powerful tactic. One thing that I would change is I would add emphasis to finding frequency for prefixes and suffixes. So not all prefixes and suffixes are created equally, so I would focus on just getting a few of them solid, and then getting some quick wins from there and scaling from that point. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. I got a question in an email from Michelle about teaching spelling to children.

Now, the way that you teach spelling partly depends on what type of word you're working on and what level of vocabulary you're doing, etc. But in general, it all begins by recognizing that not all parts of a word are created equal. So the way that you would approach spelling is by treating different parts of a word in different ways and teaching by focusing on different parts. So I would do this in two parts. First of all, instead of actually teaching the spelling of words one word at a time, I would start by teaching sections of words that will be used over and over. Things like prefixes and suffixes. So find the most common prefixes and suffixes and start by teaching those. Get the

child accustomed to using I-O-N at the end of words and P-R-E at the beginning of words and U-A-L-L-Y for some words. Drill them in those common prefixes and suffixes so that they really don't have that much to learn for a lot of words. After that, for teaching individual words, the trick is not to teach the actual spelling of the whole word. Instead, simply focus on a small section of the word and getting that one part of the word right. Perfect the spelling of just one syllable of the word, whatever syllable gives the student the most trouble, and for a while, actually only quiz on that one syllable. Most of the time, the syllable that you focus on teaching is going to be the stressed syllable

of the word. You'll find that the rest of the word is actually fairly intuitive to spell or can be easily corrected as long as that one primary syllable is solid. Let's use a few examples of words that might come up in a fifth grade spelling test. The word individual, well, the stressed syllable is vid. It may seem really strange, but if you quiz the student on that one primary stressed syllable, vid, V-I-D, the inda and the uol for before and after that syllable will be very easy to learn. Just focus on that stressed syllable first of all. Now, how about the word ACTUALLY? I think a lot of students

that suffer with the word ACTUALLY are actually getting it wrong. Wow, I just said ACTUALLY twice. Are actually getting that word wrong because they have a problem with the T. So if you focus on the first syllable, ACT, for actually, if they get the ACT right, then the rest of the word will be easy. U-A-L-L-Y, that's a common suffix. Drill on the ACT when you say actually. It's similar with the word quotient. If the student knows Q-U-O-T for the word quotient, the rest of it will be pretty easy. Q-U-O-T-I-E-N-T. And then conservation. Conservation is actually fairly intuitive to spell as long as they know that the stressed syllable is spelled V-A-T. With words that end with the syllable shun, there are two common endings. There's T-I-O-N and s-i-o-n. But if you include that t in the

stressed syllable, conservation, v-a-t, then they'll know which one to use. It's a matter of taking the smallest element that you can and leveraging that. This is an example of the 80-20 rule. So we're taking just a part of the word, we're getting that really solid, and then the rest of the word is very easy for the student to learn. Now, if you actually look at the division of syllables in a dictionary for these words, they might not exactly line up with what we're doing here. So, for example, the word actually is divided with the AC in the first syllable and the TU in the second syllable, and so on. But that's okay. I would actually just ignore that. Instead, pull as many consonants as you can into that one syllable that you're teaching. So the stressed

syllable of actually is actually ACK. I need to stop saying actually, but it's ACK. But you can just pretend that the stressed syllable is ACT, and the student will learn a lot better that way. They can learn syllable divisions another time. So I hope that helps you, Michelle. I think this is going to make a huge difference for you. This tactic is also going to teach students to listen more carefully when people are talking and to focus on those stressed syllables, which is a really handy skill for many reasons, including learning other languages. All right, I hope you've enjoyed this reprise episode. For anyone who has any questions about learning or memorizing anything faster than ever,

feel free still to leave a message at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll be able to respond quickly to your message from wherever I am. I just won't be able to record an episode on that topic until I'm back in the States in May. Meanwhile, if you want to support the show, please check out our Spanish course at masterofmemory.com slash Spanish. Or if you want to follow my adventures in Argentina or wherever else I might happen to be,

you can do that at timothymoser.com.