Spelling Practice: 7 Ways to Make It Fun

How to practice spelling words is a familiar dilemma for parents of elementary school students as they prepare for their children’s weekly spelling test ritual. Many students are given a pre-test at the beginning of the week and are expected to practice spelling words throughout the week for a test on Friday. Whatever your child’s spelling schedule, he’ll no doubt see it as a weekly assignment. Some parents struggle more than others when teaching their child (perhaps unintentionally) to spell words over and over again. Worse yet, some families forget to practice until the night before the test.

The most obvious methods of how to practice spelling words are the oral exercise and the written practice test. A good way to start practicing is to have your child copy the words directly from the list. Any words that were misspelled in the pretest must be copied twice. Then switch things up by using some of the following ways to practice spelling the words.

1. Write! Open a word processing program on your computer and read your child’s spelling list. As your child types words, they will practice typing and spelling.

2.Scrabble! Get out the tiles from that old Scrabble game and have his kid arrange the letters of his spelling words on one of the shelves.

3. Look it up! Create a word search with the weekly spelling words. You can do it by hand or with one of the many free online tools, like Puzzlemaker.

4. Turn it up! Have your child spell the words while doing a physical activity, like jumping. They can do a jump while saying each letter of a word. Repeated physical movements stimulate the brain to work at a higher level, helping children memorize words more easily.

5. Firm! Using American Sign Language letter signs is a great way to not only practice spelling, but also hone those fine motor skills and learn another language. Instructions on how to make the sign language signs of the alphabet can be found in many books and online, such as Signing Savvy.

6. Crack it! A parent writes the spelling words with coded letters and the child unscrambles them to spell the words correctly. Alternatively, he can take out the letter tiles again and shuffle them around.

7. Cheer up! Let your child be your cheerleader. Have him call out the letters of the spelling words as you repeat them. (“Give me an A!”) Go team!

I hope the above techniques give you some helpful ways to practice spelling words with your children. Helping your kids with homework shouldn’t be a chore for you or your kids. By using the methods above, you can turn your kids’ spelling homework into quality family time. Find out which methods work best for your family and see how your kids ace those weekly spelling tests!