Have You Met My Friend, Schwa? As a natural English language inquirer, my friends have come to see me as the resident spelling guru of our group, so naturally, I get all the puzzling spelling questions. My most recent inquiry was, “I heard that something called schwa is the most common vowel in the English […]
A Yummy Double Whammy As the days get longer and the weather gets warmer, it’s easy to allow our minds to wander to lazy summer days eating sweet treats to the tune of carnival rides and laughter. I’d like to keep this sentiment alive with our next rule: Taffy Apple. Photo by John Jackson on […]
The Secret Cricket Has Spoken Psst...PSST! I have a secret to share with you...I know the secret to spelling a really tricky sound. It’s one of those sounds that even good spellers sometimes mix up. Do you know the best part? I give you permission to share this secret with ANYONE! If you’ve been following […]
Avoiding the Spelling ICK with a Sick Trick: Spelling /K/ at the end of a word Imagine yourself as a struggling speller… You know your letter-sound correspondences. You’ve worked hard to learn the differences between long and short vowel sounds, and you’ve worked through these funky things called digraphs (th, sh, ch, ck, wh). Now […]
Munch a Batch of Cookies Let’s chat about the challenge of matching the correct spelling for /ch/ when you have a bunch of ways to spell it. It really is a cinch if you ditch the guessing and snatch the rule from this catch-y blog entry! Okay, okay, enough of that chatter. Yes, I suppose […]
Spelling /K/: Tricks to Sort out the /K/-Conundrum Have you observed your student struggling to spell the /k/ sound? If so, this might look familiar: Of course, we want our students to use efficient and logical strategies while spelling, so we teach them spelling rules. I’m about to show you two handy rules that will […]
Sam Loves Fried Zucchini (aka the Floss Rule) As educators and parents of struggling spellers, we all can relate to the writing sample above. Students are often confused about how to double letters when they come at the end of a word. As seen in the word “tripp,” struggling spellers will often over-generalize doubling rules […]
Struggling with spelling can be embarrassing as a child and even more embarrassing as we grow older. Some people might think that because there is spell check on our phones and our computers and because we rarely physically write notes to employees, that spelling is not as necessary as it used to be. But have […]
Teachers and parents often struggle to find the right tools to help students with spelling and/or reading difficulties. Dyslexia and dysgraphia are the most common reasons a person will struggle to spell. To help students with either learning disability, Silver Moon uses an Orton-Gillingham approach, an explicit, structured, cumulative, and multisensory technique, that builds a […]
English Has 7 Types of Syllables There are 7 types of syllables found in the American English Language. My students always get excited when I tell them this. Our language is rich with words, yet all of our words only contain 7 types of syllables. Wow! That sounds manageable to learn. When students are familiar […]
