Getting Spelling Sorted (Rising Stars Spelling)
Right, I’ve got Maths first, that’s sorted…then it’s English, I need to borrow the texts from next door. Handwriting…. Which week are we on? Then History. Damn it’s my lunch duty today. I’ll have to work out exactly what is going on this afternoon at lunch… oh hang on.. spelling… er… I’ll grab some words from the National Curriculum list… If only it wasn’t staff meeting night tonight….(sob)
…Sound familiar?
Okay it’s a little tongue in cheek but we’ve all had days like that. If you’re anything like me, you’re juggling 17 different hats on a good day. As teachers, we try and be creative, structured and make learning fun as often as possible but sometimes we would benefit (our children certainly would) from someone well informed doing it for us.
And that’s what Rising Stars Spelling does. This might sound like a bit of a sales pitch but it honestly isn’t. With the 2014 curriculum we need to get high quality resources into our schools and we need to share what works by looking at what really makes an impact. And this does just that.
It takes the hard work needed and presents you with an easy to follow, whole school approach to spelling with high quality ready made resources. Instead of dry lists of spellings, you get a well thought out structure which focuses on spelling rules and patterns whilst integrating specified national curriculum words and misspelt words from children’s own writing. And yes, I did have to ironically spell check ‘misspelt’.
Of all the lovely 2014 English curriculum resources we now have at our school, Rising Stars Spelling is by far my favourite. It’s simple to follow, easy to roll out across school and rapidly improves the quality of spelling teaching and learning. Built on a tried and trusted phonics style unit structure of ‘introduce, teach, practice, apply and review’, each unit covers sufficient depth that children develop their understanding of morphology rather than simply practicing some words for a spelling test (which in my experience does not always result in them spelling them in their independent writing!)
Sure, you can still do a test if your school choose but would it not be more fun and just as beneficial to use the unit’s cloze procedure and word searches/crosswords? All included! Before you get that far expect your children to engage in discussion, make ‘best fit’ groups of words based on spelling patterns, play games that have them moving around the room as well as practicing writing words out. Quite simply, Rising Stars Spelling sorts you out as an individual teacher and a whole school… instantly.
I can’t stress this enough, without this resource several of our staff would admit they would still be fumbling in the dark, splitting up the statutory word list, missing out many spelling patterns altogether and generally have a bad experience with anything to do with teaching spelling.
What Rising Stars Spelling does is give you a vehicle for your school to improve their GPS test results whilst children also integrate their spelling learning into their daily writing.
What’s the catch? Price? Nope. Cheaper than a 1 year subscription to some leading online spelling packages. Except that with Rising Stars Spelling there is no subscription, just the cost of the purchase. Sure, you could have a digital package to support children learning each week’s spelling patterns as well, that would be ideal but the impact of this resource compared to a 1 year subscription is insane.
From the rest of my blog you might notice that I am a big fan of technology. And as such (and to prove I am receiving no benefits whatsoever to writing this blog other than sharing a great resource with you) my one criticism is that the bright people at Rising Stars haven’t (yet) partnered up with any online spelling package to give that extra bit of practice that many children need to secure their learning. I have taken it upon myself to rectify this for my own year group by setting up each week’s spelling focus on a couple of digital packages myself (the always reliable but very American Spelling City and Quizizz — both free). The key here is this is just additional practice and by underpinning anything like this with Rising Stars Spelling, children simply deepen their understanding of the rules and patterns they are being exposed to and that has got to be the right way to go with any mastery focused curriculum. If you happen to be in Year 3 and are using/going to use Rising Stars spelling, feel free to steal all my hard work on Quizizz — just search for ‘Y3 Rising Stars Spelling’ (Quizizz, if you are not familiar, it is like Kahoot but has the advantage to being able to be used independently and as homework as well as in a whole class.
