RWI spelling

Spelling

At Long Toft Primary School we use Read Write Inc to teach pupils how to spell. From joining us in the Foundation Stage we use Read Write Inc phonics to teach your children how to read and spell. For more information about the RWI programme that we use in school please see the page on the website.

Read Write Inc. Spelling Programme

This year we have introduced the Read Write Inc Spelling Programme at Long Toft Primary School from Year 2 to 6 for the following reasons;

• To enable to allow us meet the spelling expectations of the National Curriculum 2014
• To raise standards in spelling
• To provide consistency and progression in the teaching of spelling
• To help support children to enable them to be more confident at spelling. 

How does this programme support your child in learning to spell?

RWInc Spelling is an interactive programme which teaches spellings in a fun and engaging way. Each unit is introduced with a short video. It helps children to learn spellings with common patterns and uses rules in order to help them recall spellings as well as teaching exceptions to these rules.

Individual workbooks allow children to practise their spellings and the teaching naturally follows on from the RWInc phonics programme taught as soon as the children enter school. Therefore the children are already proficient at using dots (for individual sounds) and dashes (for digraphs) and prefixes and suffixes can be added to root words to help them to spell with greater accuracy, understanding and confidence.  Log books give children ownership of their spellings and further consolidation at home.

How the Log Books support your child to spell

All children now have log books and these are important in helping them to practise the spellings they need to learn from each unit. Each unit explains the rules and gives handy tips and rhymes for remembering these. During the week the children will log the spellings they found tricky. At the beginning of the next unit they will do speed spell which will assess their ability to spell words with the previous weeks spelling pattern correctly. Again they will log any words that were misspelt from this activity.

There are 3 log books that your child will receive throughout school. One for their time in Year 2, one for Years 3 and 4 and one for Years 5 and 6. It is important they look after their log book as they will keep the same one for up to 2 years.

Handy Tips for supporting your child with spelling

• Make sure that the year group spelling lists are used to practise the tricky spellings regularly. 
• Help your child to learn the words for each unit. These will be sent home.
• Revisit spellings from previous weeks.
• Ask your child to explain the rule for the week and get them to give you example words so that you can build up a word bank that can be referred to frequently.
• When your child is practising spellings remind them to use their dots and dashes and ‘fred fingers’ to spell (if required)
• Encourage your child to edit their own writing for misspelt words using the sounds chart in the log books to choose the right grapheme.
• Play homophone games where you give them a word like right/write and they write you both spellings and show you on the sounds chart which graphemes they would choose to spell them right! Make sure they know which one is which!
• Play hold a sentence dictation where you give the child a short sentence with one of their spellings in which will help them to understand the meaning of the word and spell and punctuate correctly

Supporting Your Child's Spelling at Home 

• To help you to support your children at home with their spellings you will be given a list of the words expected for their year group/phase. These can also be found .
• To access a copy of the National Curriculum word list for each year group click on this link.

Alternatively, please see the lists below