4 Easy Activites to Improve Reading Skills (Part 2 – Spelling)

As a parent, you do have the power and ability to help your kids improve reading skills. Now what I mean here is that you as a parent can help your child whether they have an identified learning disability, dyslexia, ADHD, or are gifted. There are 4 easy to implement activities that take just a few minutes a day to improve reading skills.

1. Improve reading fluency in 5 minutes a day
2. Improve spelling and learn the 8 ways we put letters together to make words
3. Improve reading comprehension by playing a reading comprehension game
4. Improve writing skills using specially designed graphic organizers

Last week I wrote about reading fluency, the first of 4 Easy Activities to Improve Reading Skills (Part 1).  Today I’m going to talk about the second activity which is helping your children improve their reading – practicing spelling with the 8 spelling patterns.

Improve Reading Skills – Spelling

So, the second of the 4 easy to implement activities to help your child improve their reading and writing skills is spelling. One aspect of reading is called decoding – the ability to sound out words. Another aspect is called encoding – the ability to spell the words you hear. This decoding and encoding ability really go hand-in-hand. Your ability to sound out words you see and then spell words you hear incorporates both visual and auditory processing skills. So, phonemic awareness and phonics come into play.

Being a successful speller impacts your writing. People may not understand your writing if you misspell your words. Unfortunately, people may judge you on the way you spell. When my daughter was in the 6th grade we moved from one school system to another. Her new teacher couldn’t understand how she could have been in a class of gifted students in her prior school when she could spell worth anything. I had to ask him to look at the ‘vocabulary’ she was using, even though many of the words were misspelled. After several weeks he finally understood that the fact my daughter was bright even though she had a spelling disability.

Phonemic Awareness is Essential for Spelling and Reading

• Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds – phonemes – in spoken words.
• It is a part of phonological awareness.

Phoneme Blending

• Children listen to a sequence of separately spoken phonemes and then combine the phonemes to form a word. /d/ /o/ /g/ is dog. (This is the process used in decoding words.)

Phoneme Segmentation

• Children break a spoken word into its separate phonemes. There are four sounds in truck: /t/ /r/ /u/ /k/. (This is the process used in spelling words phonetically: “invented spelling.”)
• Phonemic awareness instruction can help preschoolers, kindergartners, first graders, and older, less able readers.
• The most important forms of phonemic awareness to teach are blending and segmentation, because they are the processes that are centrally involved in reading and spelling words.

Important Points about Phonemic Awareness

• Phonemic awareness can be taught and learned.
• Phonemic awareness can help students learn to read and spell.
• The relationship between phonemic awareness and learning to read and spell is reciprocal: having phonemic awareness helps children learn to read and spell; learning to read and spell words by working with letter-sound relationships improves children’s phonemic awareness.

Learn more about phonemic awareness.

Solutions to Improving Reading Skills: Spelling

We have two solutions to improving reading skills through spelling.

Solution 1: Learning Spelling and the 8 Spelling Patterns through Bonnie Terry’s Spelling Books