At Forest Academy, we feel strongly about supporting children to be brave spellers. We understand the importance of children learning to spell correctly, but we also want to engage and inspire children with a love of words. This is why we have implemented the Jane Considine approach to spelling which puts the children's love of words at the heart of learning to spell.
Lessons encourage children to look deeply at words, draw and build upon their knowledge of phonics from KS1 and make connections with spellings or letter patterns that they may already know.
Starting in Year 2 and into all our KS2 classes, the children will complete spellings on a two-week timetable.
During Week 1 the children will have two sessions: one 30 minute session, one 20 minute session. The first session is the Investigation where the children explore proving or disproving a spelling hypothesis. The second session - Go Grapheme Grafters - focuses on using phonics and their own learning to unpick words and come up with strategies to help.
During Week 2, the children will have five 10-minute sessions that will work on children practising and applying spellings under time pressure to support their ability to spell more accurately in lessons and other real-life writing scenarios.
This approach is about helping children make plausible spelling choices in their writing that make sense and, even if not correct, have phonetical reasoning at the heart of the letter choices being made.