Spelling

Dear Parents,

A regular activity with children when spelling at school is the MASUTA process.  It’s an acronym for Meaning Analysing Synthesis Using Testing Applying.

With the teacher, children discuss a word’s meaning and use it in a sentence to display understanding.  They look at whether it has a prefix or suffix and if it does, the base word (morphology). They discuss its origins (etymology) and talk about other words in that family.

Then, using the Thrass chart, syllables are clapped, to check whether there is one vowel per syllable.  The word is segmented into phonemes (sounds), and the difficult grapheme (writing choice) identified.  Discussion would continue about digraphs, trigraphs and even quadgraphs.

Children write the word, often using a coloured pencil to identify their tricky grapheme. 

Part of this is the “I do, we do (together with the teacher) and finally the you do (children on their own) process.”

As you can see, spelling is not just copying letters but a much more involved study.