4 Great Exercises To Help Children Improve Their Spelling Skills

Spelling is an important skill to teach children when homeschooling, but it is getting more difficult.

Help Children Improve Their Spelling Skills

Technology is great and it opens up a lot of new possibilities for teaching, but when children are using computers more often and they don’t do as much writing by hand, their spelling can sometimes suffer because the spellcheck does all of the hard work for them.

That’s why it’s a good idea to get the children to write by hand as much as possible during lessons. There are also some simple things that you can incorporate into lessons to help with their spelling.

Here are 4 great exercises that help kids to improve their spelling skills.

The Spelling Ball 

Tossing a ball around is a simple but fun way to make lessons more engaging. It also gets everybody on their feet and gives the kids a break from sitting down, which helps to keep their energy and concentration levels up.

You can use this technique for spelling if you simply call out a word and toss the ball to somebody. They then have to spell the word. If they do it correctly, they call out their own word and pass the ball on.

If they do not spell it correctly, they toss the ball and whoever catches has a try. Alternatively, you can play a more advanced version of the game where each person that catches the ball adds one letter until a full word has been spelled out. 

Anagrams 

Anagrams are a great way to improve spelling because they encourage your child to consider each letter and how different letters group together to form certain sounds.

This is a simple exercise that you can do at the beginning or the end of a lesson. Try looking through their work and finding the words that they have trouble with, then make them into anagrams.

You can use this word unscrambler to double check that the anagrams are all correct first. You don’t want to confuse the kids by giving them anagrams that do not unscramble into correctly spelled words.

This is a much more fun way to teach spelling instead of simply testing them on words. 

There are quite a few games out there that involve solving anagrams, like Boggle, Scrabble, and Bananagrams.

When playing some of these more structured games, kids might want to use another online tool, Unscrambled Words, which allows them to specify if the word must start with, end with, or contain letters in a certain order.

Reading Toys 

Educational toys are so effective for improving engagement in kids. If your children are young and they are just getting into reading, Read with Me Scout from Leapfrog is such a great toy.

It’s a plush toy that comes with books and the toy will read out the book as the child follows along.

This is a great way to improve spelling because they can follow the words as they are read, and pay attention to how they are spelled and how each sound is formed. 

Spelling Apps 

As they get older, some of these reading toys will be too basic for them.

But there are plenty of great spelling apps that you can download onto a phone or tablet. Most of them have simple spelling practice sections but they also contain a lot of great games to make spelling practice more fun for your children. 

These are all great, fun ways that you can improve your child’s spelling ability without going over boring practice lists over and over.