How To Teach Spelling at Home

If you're wondering how to teach spelling at home, it doesn't need to be complicated. Here are five ways to make spelling at home fun!

Last year was a harder school year for Kyle that led us to doing a lot of digging around his academic performances. While he is super bright and amazingly gifted in a lot of areas, we noticed that spelling was something he was struggling with. We started implementing these five spelling strategies at home, and Kyle's spelling skills have dramatically improved. We're really proud of how far he's come in the last year. 

How to Teach Spelling at Home

Spell the Words in Shaving Cream:

Remember how much fun it was to clean your desk with shaving cream in grade school? You can totally do this at home on your kitchen table. Give them a bunch of shaving cream on the table, and then let them have fun spelling their words in the shaving cream with their finger. Yes, it does make a small mess, but it's mostly soap anyways, you child will love it, and it will teach spelling in a fun way, while also reinforcing reading and writing.

Make a Spelling List Word Search: 

Children learn in so many different ways, and word searches help them with seeing, spelling, and learning to read the word. I found an online word search generator that allowed me to paste in his spelling words, make it to the size we wanted, and configure which ways we did and did not want the words to appear in the search, and then it generated the entire thing for us. We set our puzzle up to only show the words going from top to bottom, and from left to right. No diagonals, and no backwards words. The website we love is Word Search Maker.

Since this only gives you the word search, we print out our own list of words separately.  

Play with your Food:

One of the best ways to teach spelling words is with cheerios or another small cereal. Let your child make out the words with the food. This will help them to both read and spell the word, and it's a fun game that crosses off snack time in one fell swoop. 

Mock Spelling Tests at Home:

Kyle definitely has a little bit of test anxiety. When the teacher is saying the words and he has to hurry up and write it as fast as he can he sometimes gets a little frazzled. Practicing at home is a great way to help him feel prepared on test day. 

Recite the Spelling back to Parents: 

Lastly, the good old fashion way of simply having your child recite the letters back to you. Spelling is definitely not an everyday endeavor in our house. I find if we do 1-2 fun activities with Kyle, he's usually ready to recite the spelling back to us rather quickly. I also find that simply reciting the spelling back to us helps Kyle recognize spelling patterns, and the sounds in words better than anything else.

Our Spelling Schedule:

On Monday Kyle's teacher emails us the spelling list. I print it out and make the word search for him. He comes home from school and does his word search, shaving cream, or cheerios spelling. And then I'll verbally quiz him on the words. 

Around Wednesday I'll check in with him to make sure he still knows the spelling, and on Thursday nights we'll do a mock spelling test. 

All of this accounts for maybe 20 minutes of the week and doesn't take much time at all!

I'd love to know how you prepare for spelling tests in your home! Let me know in the comments below. 

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