Spellings: To test or not to test?

Anyone had thoughts about abandoning age-old practices of Friday spelling tests?

You all know the drill, I’m sure many of you did it when you were still at school: you get the words on a Monday to practice them during the week, then take a test on Friday. Great! If you get a high score, not so great if you don’t…

As a teacher you then start marking independent work and notice that children are still misspelling those same words and many others that share that specific spelling feature! Arrrgghhh!!

Could abandoning this practice, be a step in the right direction? 

Teaching spelling well, is a massive topic! It’s clear that we need to teach kids to spell in a way that makes sense to them. No one doubts the importance of spelling – it supports both reading and writing fluency. We also know that methods like the one described above, most…