Did you know that spelling and reading are co-related to a huge extend? From spelling tests to spelling competitions in schools, there is a massive stress on being fluent in spellings at a young age.
We are here to discuss how spelling supports reading and the great importance of spelling for kids.
Fundamental Operations of Reading
To help your child read fluently, you will need to teach them the four fundamental reading operations.
1. Read the letters
Reading the letters of words is the foremost step of reading. Consider the word - vaccine. Before reading the word as a complete unit, you should teach your child first to inspect its letters — v-a-c-c-i-n-e.
2. Divide them into chunks
Once they can read the letters in the word, you will need to teach them how to divide it into groups of logical chunks — vac-cin-e.
3. Associate sounds
Once they have divided letters into logical chunks, associate sounds with each chunk — /vac/ /cin/ /e/.
4. Put them together
After associating sounds to the chunks of letters, they will need to finally put them together to form one entire word — vaccine.
Phonology, which is the knowledge of sounds, and orthography, which means understanding letter patterns, plays a huge part in our daily lives. Knowing both makes your reading efficient.
Fundamental Operations of Spelling
For spelling a word, reverse the above process. Here’s how the fundamental operations of spelling work:
1. Listen to the word
Teach your child to listen to a word. In the fundamental operations of reading, this step usually comes at the end of the process. Make them hear the word — vaccine.
2. Break into chunks
Then tell your child to break the word they heard into logical chunks — /vac/ /cin/ /e/.
3. Associate graphemes
Assign graphemes to the chunks of words. A grapheme is a way of writing phonemes. In this step, your child will need to associate graphemes with the individual chunks of sounds — vac-cin-e.
4. Put them together
The last step will include your child attaching the graphemes together to form a written word — v-a-c-c-i-n-e > vaccine. This is a subconscious practice you will have to let your child learn and instil upon them.
Inverse Relation – Phonology and Orthography
Phonics for reading and spelling are deeply connected to efficient communication. Along with phonemes, graphemes are also an integral part of effective daily communication. The GPC (Grapheme-Phoneme-Correspondence) suggests that about 50% of the English words follow the rule of sound-symbol correspondence. But some words do not follow the GPC rule because of the irregularities in the English language. For example, the word ch in chime, chef, chemistry all have different pronunciations in different words.
Importance of Spelling in Reading
Spelling words need to be taught to kids at a young age, as it lays the foundation for more complex words and sentences. Spellings teach kids the interconnection between letters and sounds.
Teaching spellings gradually help in reading for kids. It supports your child in storing information in their long-term memory, and they are more likely to retain spelling and reading-related information.
Spelling correctly comes with hundreds of other benefits, such as - using a thesaurus, encyclopaedias, filing things up alphabetically, and many more.
Even with technologies such as spell check and word processors, your kid will still need to learn to spell to be more vocal and express their message clearly and concisely.
How Does Spelling Support Reading?
1. Forces kids to focus on the letter combination in a word
When readers scan through content without focusing on the letter combination that makes up the word, they cannot process the whole word. Young kids do this more often, like skimming through the first letter only and then making the mistake of guessing the wrong word.
2. Your child will take words out of context
Kids more often use context to read words. For example, a child might take the help of a picture book to figure out the word toy and also use the context of the story to figure out the word play. In this scenario, the child is making guesses of the words and is not combining letter to letter that made up the word.
Using context for kids is not a bad thing, but the heavy reliance on context to figure out unknown and complicated words will cause a problem in the future.
3. Teaches the interconnection of words by spelling and their meaning
Creating a list of well-curated words for your child will help them highlight patterns in words, how to use them in the language, and word structure.
4. Enables more fluency in reading
Reading spellings majorly rely on your child’s fluency in their ability to recognise words. Leaving meaningful spelling instructions for your child to read and understand will enhance their ability to understand the logic and patterns behind a word and use the logic for other similar words.
5. Will comprehend texts
If your child can decode the strategies used with their spelling instructions, they will read words more efficiently. If they labour less behind spellings and words, they will spend more time understanding the meaning of the text.
Ingraining Fun Into Learning Spelling for Kids With PlanetSpark
Spellings are an integral part of your child’s language learning journey. Letting them know the importance of spelling leads to effective communication.
PlanetSpark knows how to hit the bull’s eye just right with our fun live learning classes. Leveraging powerful technology, we provide your child with all the new-age skills he needs to learn. From debating to creative writing, learning never stops here!
