Home Support

Learning to read, write and spell is a task that requires support at home as well as instruction at school.  The most valuable contribution parents and families can make to their children’s literacy development is lots of pleasurable experiences reading together and making up stories.   Building children’s vocabulary knowledge and providing lots of opportunities to find out more about the world lays the foundation for their future reading and writing skills.

English is a complex language to learn to read and spell and many intelligent and articulate people don’t find it easy.   Spelling in particular is difficult for many people who do not find it easy to remember the visual images of words.   These people need to learn how the spelling system of English works so that they can correct the words they write that sound right, but look wrong (orfull/awful, hoyst/hoist, mows/mouse).   The incorrect spellings might look like ‘bad’ spelling but they actually show that the person writing them knows quite a lot about the alphabetic code – but not enough about the spelling system, to make the word look right.  They are examples of good (phonetically accurate) spelling, but not accurate spelling.

Read this article to find out why learning to read and spell is difficult for many people.

Teach-Students-How-Words-Work

If you are a parent wanting to help your phonetically accurate speller become a more accurate speller  you can use Switch on to Spelling with children aged 6 to 10.  For students older than this go to www.code-ed.co.nz to find the updated resources suitable for students from Year 4/5 to adults.   Resources for preschool and the first year at school will be available through Code-Ed mid 2021.