Parents are often desperate in trying to find out how to teach their children to spell. Below are some suggestions I’ve seen over the years. I will attempt to explain why these suggestions fail. The grasping at straws is due to a societal misunderstanding about how words are created and how spelling works. Let me see what I can do help people understand why these techniques don’t work and what would be a better solution.

Creating a mnemonic

<necessary> Never Eat Crisp, Eat Salad Sandwiches And Remain Young

A mnemonic is a mechanism to bring back a memory or a picture. While it is often synonymous with an initialism memory picture, a mnemonic can be a variety of things. The problem with the initialism is that there is a sentence to memorize for every problematic word, instead of just one word. An initialism also doesn’t teach a student anything about the structure of a word, such as the morphemes or the graphemes. The other problem that can be encountered with initialisms is getting the saying correct. In the example for <necessary>, it is possible that one of the words is omitted or replaced. I could see Never Eat Crisps, Eat Salad Sandwiches And Remain Young being misconstrued as Never Eat Crispy Chips, Eat Soup and Salad When You Are Young *<neccesaswyay>. Sometimes big picture processors are more concerned with the concept of the phrase than the exact words of a phrase for a mnemonic. 

A word like necessary is best looked at in relation to the base <cess>. This base has a ton of relatives. Just seeing that <recess> is connected may be enough to help with the spelling of necessary. The conceptualization of this base reduces the cognitive load of the sequence of letters and how many <c>’s and <s>’s are in <necessary>.

Spelling one letter at a time

Rainbow spelling

• b
• be
• bea
• beac
• beach

There are quite a variety of spelling activities that encourage spelling one letter at a time. Rainbow spelling listed above is one. Another very common way this happens is the use of magnetic refrigerator-type letters or letter tiles. Many will ask why is this problematic, aren’t words made up of letter?

The answer is that words are spelled with graphemes. Letters make up graphemes (such as <sh> and <tch>), but we don’t spell with actual letters. In the example of <beach>, there are 5 letters, but only 3 graphemes: <b> <ea><ch>. Each grapheme write a phoneme, a pronunciation. We do have single–letter graphemes such as <b>. We have 25 of them actually, but kids need to learn early on that we spell with graphemes, not letters.

An adaptation would be to use magnets or tiles that are graphemes and not just letters. I’m not sure about rainbow spelling but at minimum it should be one grapheme at a time, not one letter. This would mean there would be 3 lines instead of 5.

Visual imprinting

Box the shape of the letters; Stare at the word to create a visual image.

Another very popular way that kids are instructed on how to spell is to burn the image of the word into their brain as if it is a painting. How do you remember how Starry Night looks like? Imagine writing this paragraph and for every single word, I had to visually recall a painting. Could I do it? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Think about how slow that would be to write anything. And, I hate to break it to you but these symbols we use are not as exciting as color and paint, texture and flow.

Here are some other ways that visual imprinting is suggested besides boxing the letter shape. When kids are asked to write a word 5 or 10 times. The idea is that there is a visual memory of how it looks and how it felt to write that word. Another common suggestion is to make a picture from the word that represents its meaning. At least this one attempts to connect it to meaning, but it is still primarily a visual imprinting task. I’ve also heard about making some letters bigger to draw visual attention to certain aspects of the word. Additionally, the activity of creating a word in play-do, while fun, and can improve hands muscles, it is, in the end, relying on visual imprinting.

We need the visual system in order to read, well, unless you are blind and read braille. Effective use of working on spelling using the visual system is the chunking of words into meaningful units, such as graphemes and morphemes. The visual system can be engaged with the lexical matrix and word sums. The writing of word sums creates the practice of manipulating morphemes while understanding how words are built.

Kinesthetic tracing

Kinesthetic tracing are things like air writing, tracing a word in shaving cream, sand, or salt. This concept is closely linked to visual imprinting. The idea is that kinesthetic movement helps to tie into motor memory. Again there is a sense that the word is visualized as a way for it to be remembered even though the output is kinesthetic.

While kinesthetic tracing might be an added way to bring multi-sensory into the world of spelling, it cannot be the primary way a child is to memorize a word. There first must be an understanding of a word’s structure cognitively. Kinesthetic tracing should only be used after there is adequate manipulation of the graphemes that make up the morphemes in a word. If used it should be an outlet with the purpose of showing an understanding of how the writing system works. It should not be used just trace a bunch of unconnected letters together. As adults we typically don’t finger trace words, we write them…with a pen.

Silly pronunciations

Saying “fry” “end” to spell <friend>.

Most often the purpose of silly pronunciations is to overemphasize a grapheme that is not what one might expect when “sounding it out.” There are multiple reasons that this is flawed. While it may help with some cases when a word is often misspelled, it reinforces that spelling is based on pronunciation, which it isn’t, at least not only pronunciation. Another problem with this is that our language is a stress-timed language, not a syllable-timed language. This means that there are a lot of schwa pronunciations. In fact, many of the misspellings in polysyllabic words is due to the schwa and the falsehood that spelling is about “sounding it out.” If there was an understanding that a base is always spelled the same no matter what affix attaches, it would help with many seemingly difficult words. The word <family> which is often misspelled as <famly> might not get missed if they understood it was related the <familiar>. Or in the example of <friend> understanding that it is related to <Friday>. The morphological understanding of related words can reduce the impulse to create silly pronunciations because our words are made up of morphemes, rather than sound written down.

While I have a ton more examples, which include some highly controversial ways that people attempt to give advice about spelling, these 5 suggestions come up over and over again from other parents. If we are going to change the massive national spelling failure, we need to start thinking about spelling differently. We need to start learning what graphemes are. We need to start learning what morphemes are. We need to stop telling kids that the only way to spell is by sounding it out. We need to start understanding out language and the beautiful stories in which it comes.