As part of  our Professional Learning Community journey, we have been developing our spelling essential learnings, scope and sequence and learning cycles across all grade levels, Foundation to Year 6. 

We have also been involved in professional learning which is an important part of the Professional Learning Community process. We have learnt that;

• spelling is a thinking activity.
• students need far more opportunities and time for the explicit teaching and learning of spelling. 
• students need to be taught spelling strategies e.g. breaking words into sounds, using syllables, breaking words by identifying prefixes and suffixes and base words.  
• English words are spelt the way they are, because of how the English language has evolved throughout a long and complex history.
• There are many conventions and generalisations of spelling that have developed over time.

Spelling knowledge and strategies needs to be explicitly taught and our students need many opportunities to learn about, and spell the words in our English language. Teachers are concentrating on providing explicit teaching and learning of spelling each day in the classroom, with the intention of improving student learning outcomes.

As part of this process teachers have been discussing the value of students having an activity related to their current spelling learning cycle, rather than  lists of spelling words for homework. Teachers have decided that learning lists of words is not the most beneficial task for students to have for homework. 

An expert in Language and Literacy Misty Adoniou says this about the learning of spelling;

‘Learning to spell through rote learning is not only impossible; it is also unnecessarily difficult. When we give students lists of words to be learned by heart, with no meaning attached and no investigation of how those words are constructed, then we are simply assigning them a task equivalent to learning ten random PINs each week. That is not only very hard, it’s also pointless. We bring a lot more than our memory to the task of learning to spell.’ (Adoniou, Misty. (Year). Spelling It Out - How Words Work and How to Teach Them,  p.43)