“How do you spell?”

If you’re an elementary teacher, you’ve heard these words MANY times!

Our default answer is often, “Sound it out.” And while this works much of the time, it doesn’t always lead to conventional spelling.

Think about the student spelling of these words: adid, jumpt, picd. Guess what? They did sound them out: these spellings are phonetically correct! And yet, they are not the conventional spellings: added, jumped, picked.

So… what do we do about? The next time you hear “How do you spell?” consider your answer carefully. Rather than simply saying “sound it out,” think about the word they are asking you to spell. If it is a word they can sound out, great. If not, consider using the language of morphology: “What is the base of that word? …and what is the suffix?”

The more we demonstrate breaking a word into morphemes during modelled/shared writing, the more likely our students will do the same when they are writing. So yes, they do need to sound out some words or word parts–some students will still need to sound out jump–but then knowing the suffix -ed will avoid the t at the end of the word, leading to conventional spelling.

Morphological awareness is sure to turn jumpt into jumped!