Spelling Proverbs to teach spelling... what are some other ways you help students with spelling...?

[Laura Gibbs]

I thought i would post something here about some materials I am preparing for my students in the coming year - as I've written about in my blog here previously, they really struggle with spelling and with the use of the apostrophe for contractions, possession, often using it by mistake for plurals, etc.

So, I want to find a way to help them get practice with that, but also to have a good time doing it. The solution I had decided on was to use PROVERBS for all the raw material - and then, when I discovered Tar Heel Reader, I realized that many proverbs lend themselves very nicely to illustrations with images!

The result: Spelling Proverbs at Tar Heel Reader. I've made five little books so far and since I have hundreds of proverbs on file, I should be able to create many more. I'm really happy with these because I think proverbs truly are reflections of age-old wisdom, and sometimes a proverb can really click with somebody, providing them with powerful insight in a memorable form that they might be able to apply in their own lives.

At the same time, in addition to the fun of the proverbs, I really do want to help my students with spelling! They are TERRIBLE spellers in ways that the spellchecker really cannot help them: they either write the wrong form of a word but because it is correctly spelled, the spellchecker does not catch it... or, when they have written a misspelled word, they cannot choose between the choices the spellchecker might offer them, not being sure which of the options offered is the correct word.

So, starting this fall, I'll be offering extra credit quizzes to my students based on these materials... and I'm also working with the materials here at Tar Heel in hopes of adding a fun dimension to my students' studies, and perhaps making something that is useful to others.

Feedback would be very welcome - along with any other tips and ideas you might have about how I can help my students (college seniors mostly) learn how to spell!!! :-)

[Mark Pennington]

I love this idea. I checked out quite a few of your books. This project would also work with teaching EL kids their idiomatic expressions. You might as well get ----- it. over or ovur. You could even do this with all of the sound spellings. Download my free sound-spelling cards at http://penningtonpublishing.com/free-flashcards/Sound-Spelling%20Fl...

Also, I do spelling rule songs-one for each of the eight big conventional spelling rules. Check out i before e Spelling Rule Song for one example. The rest are on my blog at http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/

[Laura Gibbs]

Mark, there is so much cool stuff at your blog: THANK YOU. I've ended up becoming a composition and writing teacher by accident, rather than by training, and I am always looking for tricks and strategies to use in my teaching - and your blog is full of stuff I think I can adapt for my classes (they are online classes, which has both advantages and disadvantages when it comes to teaching writing).

I've ended up doing things with proverbs just because that is something extremely fun and exciting for me, and I like to think that there is some positive "infectious" power if I am doing something that is a lot of fun for me, so that maybe the students will have fun, too... and when it comes to spelling or writing mechanics, something perceived as very un-fun by most people, trying to find ways to have fun with it seems really important.

The Tar Heel Reader project is simply AMAZING. I learned about it here at Fireside and have had huge success with getting Latin teachers to use it - it's the first time I've shared an online technology with Latin teachers where a lot of teachers have embraced the technology and used it to create and share materials online together. If you're interested in creating your own Tar Heel Readers, I've got some notes here about getting started at Tar Heel Reader - it is so easy, and working with all the available images at Flickr is a real pleasure! :-)