5 Ways To Improve Your Child’s Spelling Skills In Fifth Grade

Spelling is a common mistakes and struggles is very common with almost every child.

This can be corrected by improving the spelling skills. Children in fifth grade ought to know most of the spellings without making slight mistakes that can easily be corrected How do you improve your child’s spelling skill in fifth grade? You can start by first establishing the common mistakes that a child does. It could be the use of a wrong vowel, consonant, leaving out some letter or adding letters where not necessary. Other mistakes that occur are by either reversing of letters.

Here are five common skills that will help your grade five children improve the spelling skills

1. Phonemic Awareness

Let your child understand and know the correct pronunciation of a word.What sounds make up a word and how they are written down. Children should understand that once the sound of a word change, the spelling will change too. This is a common mistake across words that sound almost the same but have different spellings. Let the child practice saying the sounds until they too can know the difference and when to write the correct word.

2. Spelling Rules

Some of these rules are doubling consonants, double vowels or short vowels. Some other letters are silent yet they appear when spelling. Other letters change their sounds according to the syllables in a certain word. They are called the common spelling rules that help you improve your grammar. It is advisable to keep the rules where the child can easily read them for reference purpose.  It is advisable to give a kind reminder to your child when they are wrong in spelling of words.

3. Teach your child how to use a dictionary

A Dictionary is the fastest reference book to get all spellings correct. Encourage your child to use it more. Electronic dictionaries are highly recommended because they will give all the suggestions of the word you intend to look up. The dictionary also marks the word that is wrong and gives the correct word which your child needs to know. Like all other dictionaries they elaborate the meaning of the word and the correct way to pronounce that particular word.

4. Rhyming words

What are the rhyming words and how can your child know them easily? Some of these words are call, tall, ball and some others. Help your child write them down, noting the “all” at the end of the words. Once they write these words more than once, they can tell of the sound and reduce on spelling mistakes.

5. Create a timetable

Have a clear timetable on what words you wish to practice each day. When necessary review the previous day work and edit where needed. However, introducing new words everyday will help the child learn fast. A topic of letter writing is a good way to help the child improve. Designate a particular place in the  house as the writing corner where there are no interruptions.

 

Children in grade five should be familiar with the most words. If this is not the case with your child, it is advisable to try out the above rules to help them improve their spelling.

Let your child write many journals and other stories that will help in improving their skills. Most important is to edit their work or practice to write a certain word more than five times.  Encourage the child to practice more on words that are nearly pronounced the same yet their spellings are completely different.

Reading should be fun therefore you need to invest time in helping them grow. Let it be your daily agenda to help the child improve and praise them when they get difficult words correct. Let your child read more novels. If there are challenging words, they should look them up in the dictionary.

Thank you,

Glenda, Charlie and David Cates