Learn spelling the wrong way and both teach and student will become frustrated. Trying to learn to spell will become even more hard work, too. Here are some common learning to spell situations and some solutions to make learning to teaching spelling a whole lot easier!

Many of the spelling methods throw far too much at the student at one time. For example, in a single lesson, some spelling methods have the students learn that the sound of long a can be spelled in all the following ways:

a (as in apron)
a-consonant-e (as in lake)
ai (as in nail)
ay (as in hay)
ey (as in they)
ei (as in their)
eigh (as in eight)
ea (as in great)

But for many students, it is simply too much! This makes trying to learn all of the possible spellings of long a at the same time a difficult and unproductive task Tie would be much better spent trying to learn a much smaller amount at one time. Try teaching just a single concept at a time.

Sometimes, a student misspells a word even though the teacher believes that he or she should be able to spell it correctly by now. For example, your student writes down the word form instead of from even though they have spelled this word correctly on other occasions. The answer is to get him or her to slowly read exactly what he or she wrote down. Make sure that the student reads each phonogram. Often, the student will catch and correct their own mistake but he or she does not see his mistake, say, "You wrote form, but we want the word from. What do you need to change?" This encourages the student to check their own work.

Teachers and parents can also find it frustrating When a student misspell outside the classroom the very same words they were able to spell in the spelling lesson. The real purpose of learning to spell is to be able to write fluently so you need to teach students strategies for spelling in real life. Dictate sentences and phrases and use writing workshop activities to give your students real life opportunity to apply what they have learned.

You might well find that the copying the words ten times over method does not work for your student. It is true that too many spelling books cause failure by just presenting a list of words and expecting the student to learn them. You need to use a variety of teaching methods to interest the student and capture their attention. This helps the student to learn to spell at a fundamental level-without having to memorize by repetition.

Regular review of spelling and spelling rules is important in order to learn spelling. Otherwise, you may well find that your kids forget their spelling words by Monday morning! Without regular review, many kids remember the words long enough to pass that spelling test but by Monday, they have already forgotten what they had originally learned.

Learn spelling by using a variety of techniques and it will be much more successful. Try a game of scrabble, for instance! Try using letter tiles, saying spelling aloud, reading the newspaper and lots of other methods and you will really accelerate your student to learn spelling.

John Higgins is a newspaper and internet writer. Find more spelling resources at http://www.all-about-spelling.co.uk and Learn Spelling