My grade two daughter is an avid reader, and is always coming up with imaginative ideas. She easily weaves these into stories and amusing plays with words. However, writing them down is not her strong suit.
She can do it, and do it well when she puts the effort into printing clearly and adding the spaces, capitalization, and punctuation. But she doesn’t enjoy it a lot of the time.
While she knows what she’s doing, it’s still slow and frustrates her to have to spend the time and physical energy. Writing involves a lot of complex fine motor movements for those little hands!
And so, I have been looking for different ways to incorporate her writing practice. I want to help her build up those muscles, and her skills to more clearly put her ideas into words (and pictures) on paper.
I asked for some suggestions to encourage learning how to spell words correctly. I wanted to be careful to encourage learning correct spelling without dashing confidence. Our distance learning teacher suggested a variety of things. One of these ideas for working on how to spell was a spelling dictionary.
The idea behind this is that it is a place for students to create their own collection of words that are interesting or meaningful to them. When a word is encountered while reading, writing, or listening to and working with words, that word is added to the spelling dictionary. Later, when they want to be reminded of how that word is spelled (ie writing in their journal), students can refer to their own spelling dictionaries.
This habit promotes writing independence. It can improve a young writer’s self-esteem to have these self-help skills. These short but sweet moments of writing words down in their dictionary also offers writing practice necessary for building muscles imperative to writing ability and stamina.
Would you would like to try a spelling dictionary to encourage writing practice for your young learner? You can find the free printable on my online educational supplies store: Language Arts (learnathomeschool.ca)
If you’re looking for some other toys, puzzles, games, instruments and other tools to enhance your learning, take a peek around the shop. I’d love to hear what you think of it so far! Comment here or there or on one of my social accounts: @learnathomeschool.ca on Instagram and Facebook.
Also, if you or someone you know has an awesome Canadian business that supplies early learning and educational enhancements, please get in touch! The goal is to build a collection as we grow to include more local Canadian suppliers and makers, replacing items shipped from out-of-country.
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