To teach spellings to a 5 year old can be stressful. To be honest, to teach anything to a 5 year old is stressful, let alone spellings.
So, what do we do? More to the point, how do we do it?
Let’s face it, what self-respecting 5 year old is going to sit there obediently while we spell out boring words for them to memorise anyway? In my experience, not many.
Okay, so you get the rare exceptions, but let’s assume like me, you have a boy and he’s your second born. He runs rings round you and doesn’t listen to you on a good day, let alone when you have something important to teach him. So, what chance do you have of getting him to sit in a chair for 2 minutes, let alone to learn spellings which will take much longer? Even if you bribe him with sweets, I’m pretty sure he’d find watching paint dry much more entertaining – So you’ve not much chance at all – I should know.
So, what do you do? Well luckily, there are a few things you can do.
Option 1.
Not bother and wait till you have developed the patience to deal with the unruly behaviour? Not very helpful I admit, but it does make a good point.
Quite often it is our own patience that needs to be developed, not our children, or we simply need to change our perspective. So let’s try that first – changing our perspective that is.
How to change your perspective
First of all, let’s state the obvious.
A five year old is NOT going to sit beautifully for half an hour and follow our instructions.
It doesn’t happen in school, so it is highly unlikely to happen at home.
In reality, you should expect no more than 5-10 minutes of absolute concentration on any learning activity. Then, your child will get bored, tired or find something more interesting within the next 5 minutes – and that’s on a good day.
So here is the good news.
This means, you only need to spend 5-10 minutes to teach spellings to a 5 year old too. Yay!
Then you can get on with your life, while they get on with there’s. So, what can you do in 5-10 minutes to teach spellings to a 5 year old?
Option 2.
5-10 minute activities to teach spellings to a 5 year old
Okay, this is going to sound off the wall, but the best way to teach spellings, is not to “teach” them at all.
Get the idea out of teaching your 5 year old out of your head right now. The only way you are going to teach a 5 year old anything and keep your sanity, is to play a game with them – everything you do with a 5 year old has to be fun, otherwise you’ll be labelled the most boring parent on the planet, and they’ll turn and run a mile from you. Not the best way to teach anything really.
So, what do you play?
Aahhha! Well this is where you need to get a little creative. You can actually play anything you like, as long as it has a twist – the bit that gets then to learn their spellings without realising – the medicine in the sugar, if you like.
Here are some ideas I used with my daughter, that worked a treat.
1. Pick an activity that your child likes doing.
- My daughter had an indoor slide attached to her bed, and she loved sliding down and crashing into the cushions at the bottom. So, I wrote her 5 spellings on cards and told her we were going to play a new game.
- If she could read a word on the card, she could slide down the slide; if she couldn’t read it, then she had to miss a turn.
- Then, when she could spell a word correctly, she could slide down the slide and if she spelt it incorrectly, then she had to miss a turn and her teddy got to slide down instead. After 5 minutes she wanted to slide down backwards, on a tummy and do all sorts of acrobatics, but was only allowed to, provided she got the spellings right. You could do something similar if you had an outdoor slide.
You can adapt this to anything your child likes doing. My son had a toy garage with cars. To get his cars in and out of the garage, he had to spell his spellings correctly, to activate the barriers and the lift, because they were the passcodes. Sometimes, the game only lasted a minute, but that was fine. A minute is better than nothing when you are starting out.
Do similar activities when they are riding a tricycle or bicycle outside. Ask them to spell their spellings correctly to get passed the barrier – you etc.
2. Play games to teach them phonics for example:
- I hear with my little ear something that begins with a ‘sh’ – shop, shoe, ship and so on.
- If their spelling words contain these sounds, it will help them to remember how to spell these words too.
- Practice rhyming words: Cat, bat, sat, mat, pat, rat then spell them using the sounds, turning them into a tunes or songs – r-a-t, b-at, c-a-t
3. Write the spellings out use:
- Coloured chalks outside –Turn writing into an art – drawing outside with big chalks is especially fun. You can join in and turn the words into pictures.
- An alternative to this is painting with water! – Get a thick paint brush and a bucket of water, then write the letters of the spelling words with water on a dry pavement.
- Brightly coloured felt tips – write the spellings out in bubble writing, so that your child can write inside your letters and/ or colour the words in.
- Magnetic letters on the fridge or magnetic board – My daughter loved this and would randomly walk back, when the mood took her, to write sentences too all by herself with no prompting from me at all, which was great.
- Finger paints – kids love getting messy, and what better way than sticking your fingers in paint and writing with them.
- A white board and dry wipe markers – This was another firm favourite. What better way to learn – if you make a mistake you can rub the offending words out quickly, without anyone seeing, till you can spell them correctly. Many children, do not like getting things wrong or making mistakes, and often avoid doing activities that make them ‘look bad’, so being able to rub mistakes out quickly is an added bonus.
- An etch-a-sketch – like the drywipe boards, these are great too, because they rub mistakes out so easily -Another of my daughter’s favourites.
If you want to develop your child’s handwriting too, you can download the Year 1 exceptions word workbooks which contain all the spellings they need to learn in Year 1. The activities in the books stimulate cognitive development and really make a child think about the words they are learning.
These activities engage a child for long enough to learn their spellings independently. So, if you are stuck for time, present them with these activities in the workbook. The books also contain cards for you to cut out, so that you can play cards games together too.
Watch them learn their spellings quickly, with very little fuss.
Remember, you do not need to spend more than 5-10- minutes to teach spellings to a 5 year old or any activity.
Alternatively, there are great floor mats to write on that are really fun for children to write and draw on.
As we can see spellings don’t have to be and should not be boring.