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We tend to be extra cautious while writing. Certainly, we don’t want to make any silly mistake and become a laughing stock — even worse, we could lose marks in the exams! While writing something, you can make three kinds of mistakes: spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

So, if you can avoid these mistakes, you’re guaranteed to have flawless writing skills! Wouldn’t that be a great thing?

Now, you should know that spelling and grammar are three completely different aspects of the English language. Your sense of English grammar will not help your spelling skills; however, it’s essential for punctuation marks.

Also, English grammar is a vast concept and we could hardly cover many areas in an article like this. You should stick to traditional grammar books if you want to become good. Plus, it’ll take years to cover all of the grammatical aspects.

Rather, we’ll help you with spelling and punctuation in this article. Especially, the spelling and punctuation rules that you need to know for spelling tests.

Let’s jump in!

 

Why Spelling and Punctuation Rules Are Important?

Spelling and Punctuation rules go hand in hand. For a spelling test, you need to have a good sense of punctuation. In fact, most spelling tests evaluate the knowledge of punctuation too.

Even the spelling tests in SpellQuiz take punctuation mistakes into account. For your spelling and punctuation exercises at school, you need to know where and when to put them in a sentence. Otherwise, you’ll lose marks!

 

Punctuation Rules Important for Spelling and Punctuation Tests

Essentially, punctuation refers to the set of rules to put punctuation marks in a written sentence as a reading guideline. These rules help the readers to decide — when to stop, pause, or change the tone.

In total, there are 14 different punctuation marks in English grammar. These are —

1. Full stop or period (.)
2. Question mark (?)
3. Exclamation mark (!)
4. Comma (,)
5. Colon (:)
6. Semi-colon (;)
7. Apostrophe (’)
8. Hyphen (-)
9. Quotation mark (“ ” or ‘ ‘)
10. Dashes: en dash and em dash (– or —)
11. Brackets ([  ])
12. Braces ({  })
13. Parenthesis ((  ))
14. Ellipsis ( … )

You should note that only the first seven (full-stop to apostrophe on the list above) hold importance for a spelling, punctuation, and grammar test. We don’t generally see quotation marks or brackets in a spelling and punctuation test.

Now, let’s turn our attention to where should we use the punctuation marks —

 

Full-Stop or Period

Full-stops (.) are the most common punctuation mark. We typically use it at the end of a declarative or an imperative sentence to show that the sentence has finished.

Examples:

• He went shopping. (declarative)
• Go there. (imperative)

Apart from that, we also full-stops after an abbreviation, fractions, name initials, and time. These full-stops don’t indicate the end of a sentence.

Examples:

• Abbreviation: He is the new E. teacher.
• Fractions: The wall is 70 meters tall.
• Name initials: K. Rowling is the author of Harry Potter books.
• Time: The train leaves at 30 a.m.

**Note: Sometimes, you need to use an exclamation mark at the end of an imperative sentence. Usually, the exclamation mark in an imperative sentence denotes urgency or seriousness.  

Example:

• Go there now! (Using the word now, you’re increasing the level of urgency here.)

Question Mark

We always put a question mark (?) at the end of an integrative sentence. This is the only rule for putting a question mark.

Example:

• When will the bus leave?

Exclamation Point

If you write an exclamatory sentence, you must use an exclamation mark. An exclamatory sentence is used to showcase strong emotion, such as — excitement, happiness, sorrow, frustration, surprise, anger, etc.

Examples:

• We have won the game!
• Ugh! This is a boring lecture.
• No! I failed in the exam.
• Fantastic, now we can all go to the party!

 

Are you looking for ways to practice spelling words for homework? Here’s guide with a large collection of unique spelling ideas. 

Comma

Commas (,) are perhaps the most common type of punctuation marks. Also, commas are the most abused and misused of all of them. The sheer number of rules for putting commas make things very confusing — even native users struggle with this one!

So, let’s pay attention!

 

1. Lists with More than Two Elements

While writing down a list with more than two elements, use commas to separate them. This is the easiest rule to remember for the commas.

Example:

• I bought chocolates, ice creams, and cakes for the party.

**Note: Adding a comma before and in a list is optional.

Examples:

• I bought chocolates, ice creams, and cakes for the party.
• I bought chocolates, ice creams and cakes for the party.

Here, both sentences are correct.

 

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2. Use Comma after Linking Words

We often start sentences with linking words. And, you need to add a comma every time after those linking words.

Examples:

• However, you should visit her.
• Also, I want to go with you.
• Moreover, I feel sorry for her.
• Plus, you owe me one.
• Nevertheless, you never thanked me for the big help.

**Note: Don’t use a comma after these introductory phrases as they function as nouns in sentences —

• That’s why I want to visit her with you.
• After the game will you go home?
• During the national anthem stand up to pay respect.

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3. Independent Clauses with Coordinating Conjunctions

If two (or more) independent clauses are separated by any of the seven coordinating conjunctions, put a comma before the conjunction. The seven conjunctions are — and, or, but, for, nor, so, and yet. To remember them, you could use a rhyme,  

And, or, but,

For, nor,

So, yet!

Let’s take a look at some examples —

• He wanted to go, but his teacher didn’t give permission.
• Sarah was sick, so her mom insisted her to take rest.
• She sang really well, yet the judges were not impressed.   

**Note: You CANNOT use a comma without a coordinating conjunction to separate independent clauses. In such cases, you’ll have to use a semicolon.

Incorrect: We were out of orange juice, I went to the store to buy some.

Correct: We were out of orange juice, so I went to the store to buy some.

Correct: We were out of orange juice; I went to the store to buy some.

 

4. Introductory Adverbial Phrases

You should use a comma after an adverbial phrase at the beginning of a sentence. For shorter sentences, you can omit the comma, but it might leave a chance to misread the sentence. So, you should take it is a hard and fast rule to always be on the safer side.

Examples:

• While Megan was sleeping, robbers entered the house.
• Because she failed in the exam, her mom was upset.
• Grabbing the umbrella, George rushed to the store.

 

5. Adding Additional Information Using Interrupters or Parenthetical Elements

You can add additional information to a complete sentence using two methods: interrupters or parenthetical elements. Now, you should remember that the removal of these two elements doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence. But they can help you add emotional depth, emphasis, and clarification.

Also, if the interrupters or parenthetical elements are used in the middle, you need to put two commas — before and after them.

Examples:

• Rainy days, my favorite weather, are best for re-watching your favorite movies.
• George Washington, the first President of the U.S.A., was the commander of the Continental Army.

**Note: You can also offer additional information using non-restrictive clauses. These non-restrictive clauses also offer non-essential information, and often, begin with which or who.   

Example:

• Gordon Ramsey, who is a multi-Michelin starred chef, is a judge of MasterChef US.  
• Jurassic Park, which is Adam’s favorite movie, won three Oscars.

 

6. Essential (Restrictive) and Non-essential (Non-Restrictive) Phrases and Clauses

You already have some idea about the essential and non-essential phrases from the previous rule. This rule elaborates the concept even further.

If we use a phrase or a clause that is essential or necessary to express the complete meaning of a sentence, we refer to that phrase or clause as essential or restrictive.

On the other hand, if we can comprehend the complete meaning of a sentence without those phrases or clauses, we refer to them as non-essential or non-restrictive.

Now comes the rule —

ALWAYS use commas for non-essentials and NEVER use commas for essentials.

Got it?

Let’s check out the examples —

• The restaurant that Sarah recommended is amazing. (Essential)
• The new Burger King Restaurant, which Sarah recommended, is amazing. (Non-essential)

 

• Please fix the grammatical errors as well as (Essential as well as)
• Grammatical errors, as well as punctuation mistakes, are distracting. (Non-essential as well as)

 

• Trees such as pine and coconut don’t shed leaves in winter. (Essential such as)
• Evergreen trees, such as pine and coconut, don’t shed leaves in winter. (Non-essential such as)

 

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation Sherlock Holmes is the literature’s greatest detective. (Essential appositives)
• My friend, Nazrin, is a wonderful speller. (Non-essential appositives)

 

7. Question Tags

We use question tags to ask the readers to agree with our opinions regarding obvious statements. These tags come after an assertive sentence and are separated by a comma.

Examples:

• These Christmas decorations are beautiful, aren’t they?
• They don’t like playing hockey, do they?
• I know, right?

 

8. Directly Addressing a Person

If you want to address someone by name, we need to put a comma before the name.

Examples:

Ron, pick up the phone.

How are you, Ashley?

 

9. Dates and Addresses

When writing date in the month-date-year format or day of the week and date format, separate them using commas. The same can be said about addresses.

Examples:

• The Avengers: Endgame initially got released on April 22, 2019.
• He was born on Monday, May 13, 1968.
• On Tuesday, December 20, at five o’clock, we will have the rematch.

 

• Write down the address — 15, Yemen Road, Yemen.

**Note: Other date formats, like — date-month-year, don’t need any comma separation.

Examples:

• The Avengers: Endgame was initially released on 22 April 2019.
• He was born on 13^th May 1968.

 

10. Direct Quote

Separate an attribute tag (he said, she claimed) and a direct quote with a comma. Also, use a comma inside the quotation marks, instead of a full stop, if the quote sits before the attribute tag.

Examples:

• Mat said, “I want to go home.”
• “Let’s play another game,” suggested Rachel.

**Note: If the direct quote before an attribute tag ends with a question or exclamation mark, don’t use a comma.

Examples:  

• “Why don’t you leave me alone?” she asked.
• “Leave me alone!” she said angrily.

 

Colon

Yes, the long list of rules for commas is quite intimidating. But don’t worry, the rest of the spelling and punctuation rules are pretty straightforward.

Think about colons (:) for example. Colons are typically used before a list. In this case, the colon is a substitute for which is or which are.

Sometimes, people use colons for quotations too. If you use colons for quotations, you don’t need to put quotation marks.

Examples:

• Phoebe invited three guests to the party: Joey, Ross, and Chandler.
• She said: The party would be a blast!

 

Semicolon

Semicolons (;) also have limited use cases. You can use a semicolon to separate closely related independent clauses. In these cases, you should put the semicolon before the linking words.

Also, you can replace the ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘but’, ‘because’ with a semicolon to shift from one thought to another without ending the sentences with a full-stop.

Examples:

• He went to the party; however, his sister didn’t go.
• Monica was sad; Phoebe didn’t invite her to the party.   

 

Apostrophe

In this rule of spelling and punctuation exercises, we’ll look into apostrophe (‘). We use an apostrophe in only two scenarios.

First, an apostrophe indicates someone’s possession. But remember, we use the possession apostrophe only for people. You don’t need to use an apostrophe for objects.

Examples:

• Monica’s Thanksgiving Turkey is very popular.
• The office door was wide open. (No apostrophe for objects)

Second, we use apostrophe contractions that denote a missing letter.

Examples:

• They’re = They are
• Don’t = Do not
• Ain’t = Am not, is not, or are not

 

Final Words

As you can see, to have an impeccable sense of punctuation, you need to have a strong grammar sense. For example, types of sentences, clauses, phrases, and conjunctions are essential for punctuation.

That’s why it’s important to study all three elements of writing, spelling, punctuation, and grammar, at the same time. Also, your writing skills will improve a lot if you can work on your spelling and punctuation practices.

What are you waiting for? Start practicing with SpellQuiz Spelling Test to improve your spelling and punctuation at the same time.    

We, the adults, often make the mistake of teaching spelling and reading as two distinct literacy skills to the children. This is not entirely our fault as we were only cramming up twentyish words every week for those notoriously hard spelling tests. We thought this was the only valid way of improving spelling skills.

In reality, spelling and reading are correlated and good spelling skill essentially improves one’s reading skills.

Today, we’d make a comprehensive analysis of spelling and reading connection and verify whether spelling supports reading or not.

 

Spelling and Reading Connection: Are They Inverse Operations?

Before we try to figure out the spelling and reading connection, we need to address two key concepts — dissection of operations of spelling and reading.

 

The Fundamental Operations of Reading

Let take a look at reading first.

When we see a written word, we take a closer look at the letters and divide them into chunks. Then, we attach sounds to each chunk. And finally, we blend them together to create the complete sound of that particular word.

For example, consider the word — mango. How do we read it or speak it out?

• Take a closer look at the letters — m-a-n-g-o.
• Divide them into chunks — m-ang-o
• Attach sounds — /m/ /ang/ /o/.
• Blend them together — mango!

No matter how hard the spelling of a word is, we always follow these steps, consciously or subconsciously. After all, these are the fundamental operations for reading.

As you can see, two different skills played crucial parts to help you read the word — the knowledge of sound (phonology) and the knowledge of plausible letter patterns (orthography). In the above example, the letter pattern -ang played the key role in helping you read the word. In formal language, we term such parts as graphemes — the smallest meaningful part in a written language.

 

The Fundamental Operations of Spelling

Now that we went through the mechanism behind reading, let’s turn our attention to spelling.

To spell a word, we often take the reversed road. First, we hear the blended sound and try to separate it into chunks. Then, assign graphemes to the individual chunks of sound. And finally, attach the graphemes together to form the written version of the word.

Again, let’s consider the word mango here. How do we spell it?

• Hear the word (blended sound) — mango.
• Break the blended sound into chunks — /m/ /ang/ /o/.
• Assign graphemes to the sounds — m-ang-o.
• Attach the graphemes together to form the spelling of the word — m-a-n-g-o > mango!

 

Are you looking for hands-on spelling activities? Here’s guide with a large collection of unique spelling ideas. 

The Inversed Relationship

By this stage, you should clearly be able to identify the connection between spelling and reading. Not only spelling and reading are inversed operations, but these two skills are also dependent on the same two special skills —

• The knowledge of sound (phonology)
• The knowledge of plausible letter patterns (orthography)

So, it’s conclusive that reading and spelling are not only connected but are in an inverse relationship.

A 1966 research (Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences as Cues to Spelling Improvement) suggests that about 50% of all English words follow the simple sound-symbol correspondence spelling rule. For example, the spelling of the words — cat, sit, rib, book — follow the sound-symbol correspondence rule.

However, the English spelling system has its fair share of irregularities too. Think of the words — chime, chef, chemistry — the ch- grapheme uses different sounds in different words. Surely, the sound-symbol relationship is not the only fundamental rule of English spelling.

So, what are they?

We’ll get to them, but first, we need to know the history of this language! The complexity of English spelling has a lot to do with the history of the language itself.

 

Interested to master all the spelling and punctuation rules? Here’s a guide to master all the punctuation rules with ease. 

The Timeline of English Language

English has evolved from the Anglo-Saxon language dated in the 5^th to 7^th centuries AD. The Anglo-Saxon settlers (people coming from parts of Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands) used this language as they settled in the southern part of now Great Britain. We refer this Anglo-Saxon language as Old English now.

Later, the Anglo-Saxon or the Old English language borrowed many words from Scandinavian Vikings too.

In 1066, William the Conqueror of Normandy, France invaded this land and as a result of this Norman Conquest, the Old English was replaced with the new Anglo-Norman language. Initially, only the aristocratic upper-class used this new language. But later it became the common tongue. We refer to this new language as the Middle English. During this phase, French and Nordic words entered the English language.

The Middle English era lasted for about 500 years until we saw the Shakespearean English in the renaissance. So, William Shakespeare single-handedly brought the revolution in English and the Early Modern English language came to being.

In this era, many Latin and Greek words became a part of the English language. Also, the foundation of English became firm in the era.

The proper Modern English language started its journey in the late 17^th century. You should also know that the British had colonies in all parts of the world and the colonial age also started in the late 17^th century.

In the colonial age, the English language borrowed many words from the colonies.

So, you see, the Modern English language has words from these languages —

Languages	Percentage (Approximate)
French	29%
Latin	29%
German	26%
Greek	6%
Others	10%

 

The Pillars of English Spelling

We got a bit off-track in the last section. But it was necessary as you now know that the English language is filled with words originating from other languages. This is one of the core reasons why it’s hard to create a set of hard and fast rules for English spelling.

And, it also shows why 50% of the words don’t follow the sound-letter correspondence.

To master English spelling, you need to have a command over these —

Phonology— The knowledge of phonemes and graphemes.  

Morphology — The knowledge of morphemes (smallest meaningful parts in a word).

Orthography — The knowledge of plausible letter patterns and their sounds.

Etymology — The knowledge of the origin of the words (Latin, French, German, Greek, or others).

If you’re interested to learn more about these spelling principles, you should check out our article on spelling assessment that offers a more comprehensive knowledge on these spelling principles.

 

How Spelling Supports Reading?

Now, let’s talk about the elephant in the room — can spelling help with one’s reading skills?

Yes! While spelling a word we’re decoding its sound and breaking it down to letters. Reading is essentially the opposite of this operation as we combine the sounds of the letters to create the pronunciation.

So, mastering spelling will automatically improve our reading skills. Also, mastering all four components of the English spelling system will ensure robust vocabulary. Even, good etymological knowledge can help one archive native-like vocabulary.  

The stronger one’s vocabulary is, the better he/she is at reading comprehension. The broader vocabulary size will help them decode apparent and hidden meaning of text.

With a strong spelling skill, one can also decode proper pronunciation of almost all English words.

How so?

A good speller can take a look at any word and reverse-engineer the letter-sound correspondence to figure out the correct sound of that letter.

For example, think of the word parliament. This is a rather complex word for the younger spellers as it doesn’t follow the simple sound-letter correspondence. If it were, it would have the spelling — parlement!

Now, a good speller would recognize the word as a Middle English word with a French origin. The etymological knowledge will also help him decode the pronunciation of parliament thus helping him read better.   

It is conclusive that spelling and reading fluency go hand-in-hand.

 

Check out our take on the best online spelling program reviews!

 

How to Participate in Spelling and Reading Practice?

One of the best ways to participate in spelling and reading practice is partaking in dictations. In such practices, one has to listen to words and write them down. This directly helps one to improve spelling skills.

And, we already know that improving spelling skill will automatically improve one’s reading skills.

So, where can you find good dictation-based spelling exercises? You can always head over to Spelling Test from SpellQuiz that lets you participate in dictation-based spelling practices.

You can also check your progress through a robust progress tracking tool and intuitive dashboard. This helps you keep track of all the mastered and non-mastered words with practice records.

Furthermore, if you want to conduct spelling and reading age tests you can participate in the vocabulary assessment test from SpellQuiz. This free test only takes about ten minutes. Plus, you can find your approximate vocabulary size and your equivalent grade level based on your spelling and reading efforts.

It goes without saying that spelling is one of the most important fundamental skills for mastering a language. Your writing and reading skills are directly dependent on your spelling prowess. You certainly don’t want to be the cause of snickering in a public place because of your clumsy spelling skills.

So, you need to work on your spelling skills as it is an evident determiner of your fluency in a language.

But where should start?

You need a scale that can indicate your current skill level so that you can strategize your path to achieve your desired skill level.

In short, you need a method of spelling assessment.

As you can guess, we’re taking a deeper dive into the concept of spelling assessment today. First, we’d cover the basics revolving around the concept and later discuss the most convenient way of spelling baseline assessment online for free!

This article will cover —

• What is a spelling assessment?
• Core components of a spelling assessment
• Standardized spelling assessments
• How to conduct a spelling level assessment online? [for free]

 

What Is a Spelling Assessment?

A spelling assessment or a spelling level test is a method for determining an individual’s level of understanding of conventional spelling patterns and rules. The assessments often focus on but don’t limit to — phonological, orthographic, morphological, and etymological knowledge.

Some experts label the assessment areas as the core components of assessment.

Now, you may ask — isn’t spelling is all about arranging the letters in an orderly fashion to form a meaningful word?

True!

But English is quite complex as it often ignores the basic rules and creates exceptions. In fact, there are so many exception rules in English that there is no standardized set of spelling rules. You can only identify some common spelling patterns and consider them as your personal spelling rule.

But you should know that almost all of the spelling rules come with a ton of exceptions.

For example, we often consider the following pattern as a spelling rule — I before E, except after C. Most of the time this rule stands true. You can see that in the spelling of the words — field, believe, lie, piece (I before E) and receive, ceiling, deceit (E before I because of the C).

However, the spellings of these English words don’t follow the rule — seize, weird, neither, science, sufficient, etc.

This is why orthographic knowledge is very important as it helps to identify plausible letter patterns. Also, the English language has borrowed words from German, French, Latin, Greek, Spanish, and even Hindi! Being a polyglot language, one must have a strong sense of etymology.

This is why a dependable spelling assessment test should cover all aspects of English spelling.

Curious to learn about spelling and reading connection? Here’s a guide to learn more. 

Components of a Standard Spelling Assessment

As we have discussed in the previous section, there are a few components of English spelling testing. We have divided the components into two categories —

• Core components
• Additional components

The four core components are —

• Phonological Knowledge
• Morphological knowledge
• Orthographic Knowledge
• Etymological Knowledge

And, the two additional components are —

• Visual Knowledge
• Semantic Knowledge

Let’s discuss them —

 

Phonological Knowledge

As start our academic journey, the schools focus heavily on developing our phonological awareness. In simpler terms, phonological awareness is the ability to coordinate sounds with the letters in the English language.

A huge portion of English words follows phonemic patterns. So, having a strong phonological knowledge helps our spelling skills.

However, a good speller understands that English is NOT a phonetic language and the spellings don’t always follow the letter-sound coordination. For example, the sound /la-it/ might have the following spelling — lite, light, and lyte! One can only be sure of the correct spelling after learning about the context.

But it is also true that phonological knowledge helps us connect the phonemes with the possible options of graphemes.  

Also, one can incorporate inventive spelling strategy into their learning efforts in the initial English learning efforts. Inventive spelling is the unorthodox approach of spelling that encourages learners to invent spellings only based on phonological awareness.

You can learn more about inventive spelling in this article on — Inventive Spelling and Its Connection to Phonological Awareness.

 

Morphological Knowledge

A good speller must have a strong understanding of morphemes. Morphemes are the core parts of the words. This includes base words, prefixes, and suffixes.

For example, magic is a base word that becomes magical with the addition of the suffix -al. In this case, magic and -al are both morphemes.

A strong morphological knowledge helps the spellers to cover multiple words with minimum effort.

Think about the word complete. We can see multiple variants of this word in the English language —

• Completed
• Completes
• Completing
• Completeness
• Incomplete
• Completion

So, the knowledge of one word helped to master six other words in this case. This is having a decent morphological knowledge plays a crucial role. It makes the process easier and achieve higher accuracy.

Also, morphological knowledge helps us to understand the meaning of words easily. For example, we know that magic means a mysterious phenomenon and -ian is a suffix that refers to a person who does something. So, combining two morphemes together we get magician that refers to a person who performs mysterious phenomenon.

So, evidently morphological knowledge helped us decipher the meaning of magician.  

Moreover, you should note that morphemes help us correlate phonemes and graphemes better. For example, think of the word jumped. The sound of this word suggests the spelling to be jumt! But as we know about the morphemes jump and -ed we can use the correct spelling jumped here.

These are the reasons why we say that English is a morphophonemic language!

 

To do well in the spelling and punctuation exercises, you need to master all the punctuation rules. Here’s a guide with all the punctuation rules you need to the exercises. 

 

Orthographic Knowledge

The third level of assessment should be about the orthographic knowledge of the individuals. In simpler terms, orthographic knowledge refers to the knowledge of feasible letter patters in a word.

For example, think about the wh- words in the wh- questions — what, when, why, where, whose, which, and how. As you can see, this cluster of words have a distinct pattern — all of them starts with wh (except for how).

A good speller has a clear idea about the common if not all of the letter patterns in English. Not only they know about the letter pairs like — ck, ch, qu, etc. they are aware of the prefix and suffix changes.

For example, you need to know that the word full drops one l when it is used as a suffix. You can see them in beautiful, colorful, joyful, etc.

Orthographic knowledge is so important that most of the traditional spelling assessments focused only on the orthographic knowledge. It’s true that only focusing on orthographic understanding makes those assessments flawed. But this also indicates the importance of this valuable spelling knowledge.

 

Etymological Knowledge

Finally comes the etymological knowledge. You should know that the English language has borrowed thousands of words from other languages. English has picked up foreign words for over a few centuries.

Here’s a fun example — have you ever wondered why the letter pair ch- has three different sounds? Consider these words — chicken, Christmas, and chef. Among these words, chicken has Anglo (English) origin, Christmas has Greek origin, and chef has French.

So, the etymological knowledge can help you master the correct spelling as well as the correct pronunciation of the English word.

This is why etymological knowledge plays a crucial role in spelling assessments.

 

Additional Components

Besides the four core components, some spelling assessments consider the following two factors as well —

Visual Knowledge — Determines how a speller stores the knowledge of spelling.

Semantic Knowledge — Determines whether the speller knows the meaning of the words alongside the correct spelling.

 

Standardized Spelling Assessments

Over the years, educators have developed numerous standardized spelling assessments. From the 1970s many rigorous assessment models have been developed. Here are the most renowned standardized spelling tests —

Standardized Spelling Assessments	Publication Year
Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement – Brief (K-TEA-Brief)	1985
Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement – Comprehensive (K-TEA-Comp.)	1998
Woodcock-Johnson-III (Form A)	2001
Woodcock-Johnson-III (Form B)	2001
Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-II (WIAT-II)	2001
Wide Range Achievement Test-4 – WRAT-4 (Forms Blue)	2006
Wide Range Achievement Test-4 – WRAT-4 (Forms Green)	2006
Woodcock-Johnson-III (Form C)	2007

However, you need proper authorization to conduct the listed spelling assessments.

 

Are you looking for creative ways to write words? Here’s guide with a large collection of unique spelling ideas. 

 

How to Conduct a Spelling Level Assessment Online? [for Free!]

While there are many standardized spelling assessments, most of them are quite old and flawed in many ways. For example, these tests focus heavily only on the orthographic knowledge and ignore the others.

Also, there is the issue of licensing and proper authorization.

What if we tell you that there is a convenient way for conducting spelling level assessment? If you are interested, you should definitely head over to SpellQuiz Vocabulary Assessment section. This is by far the most advanced spelling assessment tool available online. 

Although this is vocabulary assessment test, the tool heavily focuses on the core components of a standard spelling test. Educators from the USA, Canada, the UK, and Australia have developed this advanced tech-focused test.

This modern approach is surely better than the ones from the 1980s!

As you start the test, you can hear real-life voice artists offering dictations and you’ll have to write the correct spellings using proper punctuation marks. In ten minutes, the test will offer you the result with approximate vocabulary size and equivalent spelling level.

Anyone can take part in this spelling level assessment as this completely free and offer you a head start to participate in the correct level of spelling tests and exercise.

Your teaching efforts should always be in sync with the age of your child, especially for teaching English spelling. Now, you should also understand the actual age and the spelling age are not the same things. A child could be twelve years old but her spelling age could be eight or even fifteen — based on her academic prowess.

You could use a spelling age test to pinpoint the spelling age of a particular child. This indicative age will help you customize your teaching efforts so that the children can learn at an optimal speed.

Today, we would take a deeper dive and learn about —

• Fundamentals of spelling age
• How to determine the spelling age?
• Why is a spelling age test important?
• Best spelling age tests

 

What Is Spelling Age?

Spelling age is the hypothetical age that indicates an individual’s spelling skills and correlates to his/her academic prowess. It is also a determiner of the individual’s vocabulary collection.

For example, Sarah struggles to master common spellings like while or stayed. She is biologically ten years old but her spelling age suggests to be eight.

What does it mean?

It means that Sarah’s spelling skills are similar to the children who are eight years old despite her being a ten-year-old in real life.

As children grow older, the curriculum introduces newer and more complicated words to them. So, it’s essential for the children to be on par with their respective spelling age. Otherwise, they will fall behind their peers and continually perform poorly in their academic lives.

That brings us to the main point of our topic today — assessing the spelling age of the child through a spelling age test.

 

Do you want to do better in the spelling, punctuation, and grammar test? Then, you need to work on your punctuation skills as this is the skill that we often neglect. Here’s a guide that covers all punctuation rules in layman terms. 

 

How to Determine the Spelling Age?

Many educators and experts have come up with different methods to determine the spelling age. Later, other educators have verified and approved of those methods due to their integrity and usability.

These methods, in general, are known as spelling age tests.

Sir Fred Joyce Schonell, an Australian educator, was the pioneer behind the development of the spelling age test. He worked closely with two other experts in this field, Orton and Gillingham developed the Schonell Spelling Age Test in the 1940s. This test still proves effective to this day.

We will learn more about this test later in this article.

Are you looking for a standardized spelling assessment? Here’s a guide that discusses everything revolving around the topic with a convenient way for conducting one. 

 

Why Are Spelling Age Tests Important?

Think about teaching integral calculus to a ten-year-old (Consider Sarah from the previous section). Without a doubt, she would struggle miserably. Her brain is developed enough to comprehend such advanced mathematical concepts. Rather she should stick to learning age-appropriate arithmetic concepts at ten.

Similarly, she would struggle hard to spell complicated spellings, such as — subterranean, exaggerate, miscellaneous, or apparatus. At the age of ten, should be able to spell words like — pair, direct, headache, style, etc.

At the same time, she shouldn’t struggle with spellings like — dot, pet, pie, leg, etc. 

In such cases, you should introduce her spelling activities or spelling tricks. These activities and tricks would help her excel. 

If a child is on the expected spelling level, you should be concerned that much. The same can be said if a child is above her spelling age.

However, if the opposite thing happens, the teachers (or the parents) should take some proactive measures to improve the children’s spelling skills. And, a spelling age test is the most effective tool that can help the teachers or parents here. It helps them to assess the amount of effort they should implement.  

Curious to learn how spelling supports reading? Check out this article now!

 

Best Spelling Age Tests

As we have said before, many educators have developed different spelling age tests. However, the fundamentals behind the tests are somewhat similar. It goes like this —

• Create a list of words with difficulty level
• Dictate the words, one-by-one (may or may not use contextual sentence)
• Ask the patriating student to write them down on a paper
• Continue the dictation test until the participant makes too many mistakes (there should be a limit of misspelled words)
• Evaluate the result based on the number of correct and incorrect words
• Cross-match the result with a perceived standard
• Assign a spelling age

If you follow this pattern, you too can come up with your own spelling age test!

However, the experts do extensive research to come up with a standard list of words and the perceived standard of correct and incorrect spelling ratio.

So, it’s better to stick with the proved and approved spelling age tests available.

The most popular and well-known tests are —

• Schonell Spelling Test
• South Australian Spelling Test (SAST)
• Blackwell Spelling Test
• SpellQuiz Vocabulary Assessment Test

 

Schonell Spelling Test

The Schonell Testing or the Schonell Spelling Age Test is one of the most popular tests available. Despite being an old method, this method still has a good reputation among the teachers.

To conduct the test, you’ll first need the actual lists. Sir Schonell has developed two lists — Schonell Spelling Test List A and List B. Each of these lists contains 100 words.

After getting the lists, you should follow these steps —

• Offer a pencil and a paper (A3) to the participant
• Ask them to write their name and age on top of the page
• Explain that you’ll speak out a word and he/she will have to write it down
• Speak out the word loud and clear (start from the beginning)
• Offer a reference sentence and speak out the word again (i.e., Net — I catch fish with Net, Net!)
• Continue this process in groups of ten words
• Stop the process once the participant makes ten mistakes in a row

Now, it’s time to make the evaluation and assign the spelling age. To do so, you’ll the following formula —

Spelling age = (number of correctly spelled words ÷ 10) + 5

For example, Sarah (biological age 10) has spelled 37 correctly. So, her spelling age is — (37 ÷ 10) + 5 = 8.7. But there’s a catch, 8.7 is a decimal number. You have to convert it to twelfths so that you get a year and a month value.

You can follow this chart —

Tenths	Twelfths
1	1
2	2
3	4
4	5
5	6
6	7
7	8
8	10
9	11

That means Sarah’s spelling age is 8 years and 8 months!

 

South Australian Spelling Test

The South Australian Spelling Test or SAST is another standardized test that works great for the age range between 6 and 15. The fundamentals of this test match the Schonell Testing in many ways.

For example, you’ll ask the participants to write the correct spelling as you dictate words from a list. Also, you’ll continue the test until they make ten consecutive spelling mistakes.

However, the word list is different here. Rather than using the 200 words (100 in each list) that Schonell used, the SAST list has 140 (70 words in two lists) words.

Plus, SAST doesn’t use Schonell’s assessment formula. Instead, it uses a statistical data chart that focuses on these factors —

• Participant’s age
• Average score
• Normal Range
• Critically low score  

You can find the complete SAST chart here. But here’s a short version to give you an idea —

Participant’s age	Average score	Normal Range	Critically low score
6	14	8-20	4
8	28	22-34	18
9	33	27-39	23
12	45	39-51	35

 

But this chart only shows the statistical interpretation data. It doesn’t indicate the spelling age. Experts have come up with the following decision-making chart —

Raw Score	Spelling Age (Years)
12 and below	Below 6.0
14	6.0
22	7.1
28	8.0
33	9.0
37	10.0
42	11.2
45	12.0
48	13.0
50	14.2
52	15.5
53 and above	Above 15.5

Again, you can find the complete SAST spelling age chart here.

Experts also acknowledge the error margin (± 2 points) in this analysis. So, instead of using a definite spelling age, they use a range of spelling ages.

For example, if Sarah gets 32 points, you should use ± 2 points error margin. So, her score range varies from 30 to 34. By that logic, Sarah’s spelling age is between 8.4 years to 9.2 years.

 

Blackwell Spelling Test

Just like the previous two test methods, the Blackwell spelling test also uses a spelling list and a unique formula to determine the spelling age.

Blackwell test comes with a unique list of 100 words with respective reference sentences. You’ll ask them to write the words down as you dictate the words. Once they make five mistakes in a row, you’ll begin the marking stage.

The Blackwell spelling test marking formula goes like this —

• Put decimal point between the two-digit score figure
• (Special case) Place 0 and a decimal point for a single-digit score
• Add 6 to the first-digit (leftmost number)

For example, if Sarah gets 36 points, that makes the decimal figure 3.6. Now, add 6 t the first digit (in this case — 3) which becomes 9.

This makes Sarah’s spelling age 9.6 years.   

Blackwell Spelling test takes things one step further. It uses spelling color groups based on the range of spelling ages so that you can categorize the students in broader spectrums.

It goes like this —

Spelling Color-Groups	Spelling Age Range
Red	0.0-7.9
Orange	8.0-8.9
Yellow	9.0-10.4
Green	10.5-12.5
Blue	12.6-13.4
Violet	13.5-16

 

SpellQuiz Spelling Age Test (Vocabulary Assessment)

Despite the popularity of the above spelling age tests, the methods are notoriously complex, especially the marking and evaluation process. If you’re looking for a modern and hassle-free approach, you should definitely try SpellQuiz.

SpellQuiz has a plethora of useful tools under its arsenal, like — spelling tests, Spelling Bee Online, Spelling Words lists, Idioms, and Quizzes.

However, we are talking about the vocabulary assessment section. Here, you’ll find dictation-based tests — just like the previous ones. The spelling list in this section is a combined effort of spelling experts from the USA, Canada, the UK, and Australia.

Now, the test section is quite similar — participants will hear a word, a reference sentence including the word, and the word again. After hearing the word, the participant will have to write it on a textbox. Thus, the process continues until the system figures out spelling age.

At the end of the test, the system will suggest the approximate vocabulary size and the equivalent grade level or the spelling age.

Compared to other traditional and older methods, SpellQuiz takes a modern approach and offers a multi-directional result. For example, no other diagnostic spelling tests suggest an approximate vocabulary size. This approach helps your vocabulary building efforts and spelling training efforts at the same time.

And the best part is — SpellQuiz Vocabulary Assessment tool is completely free!

Why don’t you give it a try?

Learning a new language has become easier than ever as we are blessed with a plethora of language learning apps. However, this situation has created a sweet dilemma for us too. Now, we have to choose between these wonderful apps — talk about the confusion!

Today, I would give a detailed review of all the language learning apps that I have recently tested. All of these apps come with pros and cons and varying features. So, read along as I talk about the features and issues of these apps.

Interested to identify your vocabulary size? Check out SpellQuiz’s state-of-the-art Vocabulary Assessment Tool for free!

Comparison Table for the Best Language learning Apps

Apps	Platforms	Number of Supported Languages	Free Version Availability	Premium Version Price (Starting)
Duolingo	Android, iOS	38	Yes	$9.99/month
Babbel	Android, iOS	14	Yes	$15.99/month
Rosetta Stone	Android, iOS	28	Yes	$11.99/month
Memrise	Android, iOS, HarmonyOS	21	Yes	$8.99/month
Busuu	Android, iOS	12	Yes	$6.55/month
HelloTalk	Android, iOS	150+	Yes	$8.99/month
Drops	Android, iOS	19	Yes	$9.99/month
Mondly	Android, iOS	33	Yes	$9.99/month

 

5 Best Language Learning Apps

Duolingo

Platforms: Android, iOS

Free Version Availability: Yes

Premium Version Price: Starts from $9.99/month

Duolingo is the most popular language learning apps out there. For most people, Duolingo is the go-to option as this platform has become synonymous with new language learning. After all, this app has over 300 million users across all platforms — far ahead of the competition.

The key feature of Duolingo is their short “bite-sized” lessons that are simple and addictive! Also, the lessons follow the gamification approach as it incorporates elements like — point system based on performance, time trials, and leveling mechanism.

All of these features make the learning experience through Duolingo challenging. The ability to learn on the go is another key factor favoring the popularity of this app.

But what about acceptance?

Duolingo English Test is accepted by more than 3,000 top-level institutions, including — Yale, Duke, John Hopkins University, Georgia Tech, and Columbia University. Yes, the app is so rich that its certification is equivalent to IELTS and GRE exams in some cases!

This certification program makes Duolingo one of the best English language learning websites if not the best!

You can download the Duolingo app for free both on your iOS and Android devices. However, the free version is riddled with ads. You can enjoy an ad-free experience with Duolingo Plus subscription but the premium package starts at $9.99 per month. This premium service could reach up to $79.99 per month.

Overall, Duolingo is one of the best language learning apps you can have.  

 

Babbel

Platforms: Android, iOS

Free Version Availability: Yes (Offers 1 lesson only)

Premium Version Price: Starts from $15.99/month

When it comes to industry leadership, Babbel is only second to Duolingo. Many prefer Babbel over Duolingo as Babbel does some things better than Duolingo.

For example, Babbel is a much better option for learning interactive dialogues and conversation. Think of the common conversations like — getting a cab from the airport to your hotel, ordering lunch, or meeting with a business client. Babbel is a superior option when it comes to mastering the situational conversations.

As you can guess, Babbel focuses heavily on teaching practical dialogues. Also, Babbel uses the real voices of native speakers which would help your pronunciation.

Another interesting feature of this app is that it teaches you a foreign language using your mother tongue’s grammatical concepts. So, you’ll be learning Spanish using English grammar (considering English is your mother tongue).

Although Babbel offers a free version, the free version only comes with a single lesson. As you can guess, you can’t learn that much in a single lesson. So, essentially, Babbel is a premium-only language learning app.

Another drawback of Babbel is that Babbel focuses too much on learning Spanish. While the Spanish lessons are top of the class, the rest of the courses (Turkish or Norwegian) seem lacking.

Do you need help with spelling practices and spelling tests? Check out SpellQuiz Spelling Tests now!

 

Rosetta Stone

Platforms: Android, iOS

Free Version Availability: Yes (Only a 3-day trial)

Premium Version Price: Starts from $11.99/month

Rosetta Stone comes from IXL, one of the biggest names in the online learning world. Rosetta Stone is one of the oldest learning platforms too. It has a rich history of over 25 years.

However, this app is quite different from others on this list. Rosetta Stone mainly offers services to corporations, public or non-profit organizations, and educational institutes. It only started offering individual services a few years back.

Rosetta Stone uses its own Dynamic Immersion method that follows a unique interactive and contextual approach. It also uses a proprietary speech recognition software called TruAccent. Plus, I need to talk about its Audio Companion tool. I can easily call it one of the best audio language learning apps because of this feature.

Perhaps the use of proprietary technologies and the vast experience have helped it win multiple awards.

Among the recent awards, the 2019 PCMag Editors’ Choice Award, the 2019 Tabby Award, and the 2019 Best Mobile App Awards are noteworthy.

However, there one thing that disappointed me a bit — there is no free version of this app available. You can only get a 3-day free trial. After that, you’ll have to go for a premium plan. Keep in mind that the subscription price varies based on the choice of language.  

Are you looking for a spelling level assessment? Here’s a guide that discusses everything revolving around the topic with a convenient way for conducting one. 

 

Memrise

Platforms: Android, iOS, HarmonyOS

Free Version Availability: Yes

Premium Version Price: Starts from $8.99/month

Memrise is one of my favorite language learning apps because of its massive collection of short videos. This platform boasts of having over 50,000 videos of native speakers teaching phrases in the genuine accent. Such practical teaching method helps the learners comprehend the lessons much better.

Another key feature of Memrise is the teach-and-test approach. First, they teach one or two phrases through videos multiple times. Then, they ask you certain questions that help you understand the proper applications of those phrases.

Plus, Memrise will repeat the previous lessons often so that you don’t forget the earlier lessons. Such spaced repetition will help you have a better grasp of the languages.

All in all, it’s quite hard to find flaws in the teaching method of Memrise — it’s certainly one of the bests out there.  You can also visit their website that includes a beautiful and feature-rich UI. This is why I think Memrise is one of the best language learning websites.

There is one issue with the Memrise though. The users have complained heavily against their marketing approaches and push notifications. Plus, the advanced lessons are only available on the premium options.

 

Busuu

Platforms: Android, iOS

Free Version Availability: Yes

Premium Version Price: Start at $6.55/month

Busuu is very different from the rest of the language learning apps as this is an AI-powered learning platform. As you sign up for learning, Busuu offers you an assessment test. With the help of AI, the platform determines your current learning level and it can even offer you a study plan. The AI also implements a strong review system that helps you remember the previous lessons.

But you’ll have to choose the premium plan to get a predetermined study plan. Also, it offers a timeline and helps you to set a goal. For example, you can learn a language in 8 months if you study for 10 minutes three times a week.

So, you have total control over your learning speed and approach. The intuitive UI is another positive thing about Busuu. This is why Busuu is great for teaching kids a new language.

Also, I’m sure that you’ll love the backstory of Busuu. Busuu is a native language spoken by only 8 people in the world! This is the mother language of a remote Cameroonian village. The app pays tribute to this dying language.

One of the best things about Busuu is that the free version is quite generous. You can learn up to one language without any hassle. No lesson is barred behind the premium plan. It’s true that you’ll miss out a lot of additional features but will not hamper your learning experience. Even the premium subscription fee is affordable.

Now you can participate in Spelling Bee Online and compete with others in real-time. Get your name on the leaderboard today!

 

Other Best Language Learning Apps (Modern Hits)

In the previous section, I talked about the most popular and powerful options out there. But in recent times, the following five apps have gained a lot of traction and definitely worth a look.

 

HelloTalk

Platforms: Android, iOS

Free Version Availability: Yes

Premium Version Price: Starts from $8.99/month

You should know that one of the best ways to learn a new language is to have real conversations with native speakers. HelloTalk capitalizes on this principle — this is a social media app that lets you talk to native speakers of different languages around the world. These native speakers will serve the purpose of your personal mentor.

Currently, the app boasts of more than 20 million speakers from over 150 countries. You should definitely give it a shot.

 

Drops

Platforms: Android, iOS

Free Version Availability: Yes

Premium Version Price: Starts from $9.99/month

Drops is more of a vocabulary building app rather than a language learning app. Rather than offering a complete course, Drops focuses on teaching the most common words of different languages.

These words are essentially like the sight words in English. Having a command over these words will help you effectively communicate with others.

 

Mondly

Platforms: Android, iOS

Free Version Availability: Yes

Premium Version Price: $9.99/month

Despite being an older technique people still prefer learning languages through flashcards. If you too prefer flashcards, then Mondly should interest you.

Mondly incorporates the classic learning techniques and innovative tools together in one platform. For example, with Mondly you can connect with your friends and play games or participate in competitions. There is a chatbot for you to practice the lessons that you have learned.

Want more?

Mondly even uses augmented reality (AR) technology to better understand your surroundings and culture!

Parents and teachers often struggle with keeping the vocabulary practice sessions fun and lively. If you ask the kids to go through word lists or flashcards every day, things would get very boring just within a few days. Moreover, they could lose interest in vocabulary practices entirely.

A great solution to this problem could be implementing vocabulary activities. You need to keep things fun and joyful so that kids love to take part in them.

The more interactive and intriguing the vocabulary activities are, the more kids will love partaking in them.

So, without any further ado, let’s jump onto some of the most fun vocabulary activities for kids.

 

Top 10 Fun and Interactive Vocabulary Activities

Drawing Sketchbooks

This is perhaps one of the most common yet most effective vocabulary activities out there. The idea behind the concept is quite simple — you need to draw the object or activity from any vocabulary list.

To make the best of it, the teacher or the parent needs to be more active.

Why? Because not every object or activity is easy to draw. For example, think of the word — anxious. This word is neither an object nor an activity, but an emotion. It could be very hard for a young kid to draw anything abstract.

So, the instructor should only include the words to the vocabulary list that are easy to draw. As an instructor, you could include words like — guitar, mango, truck, running, fishing, etc. A child should be able to draw these things with ease.

Also, don’t try to be judgmental about the quality of the drawing here. Remember, the main goal is to help the child relate the drawing with the words. The more they relate or associate the words with other things, the better they can remember them.

Plus, you should have a sketchbook to have all the drawings and the words in one place. It will help you keep track of the words that your child has mastered. Here’s a cool idea — try going for a DIY notebook. Things will become more exciting for the kids as they will feel eager to draw on the notebook that they’ve made by themselves.

 

Word Mapping

Word mapping can be an extended version of the previous vocabulary activity. You could even use a whiteboard. But with whiteboards, you can’t keep records of the words that our child has mastered.

That’s why a notebook is a better option to practice this vocabulary activity.

So, the basic idea goes like this — you’ll write a word and draw five (the number may vary) lines linked to it, like a spider web. Now, your child will have to write five words at the end of the lines that are linked to the primary word.

Still confused? Here, let me simplify it with an example.

First, write the word house and circle it. At the end of the five lines, your child could write — walls, windows, doors, roof, and fence.  

So, the kids are basically grouping and clustering words that are related to each other together. This holistic approach will help them memorize more words easily. Also, they will be able to remember them easily as they’re using others to create a connecting bridge.

Just like the previous activity, you could have a DIY notebook that will serve as a record book for future practices and revisions.   

 

The Detective or the Sherlock Method

The Detective is one of the most fun and creative ideas. Even the name of this activity sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?

So, how do you play it?

First, you’ll need a text and go through it first by yourself. You could pick up any text, even from her favorite storybook. Then, you’ll set some questions, like —

• What is the longest word in the text?
• Which word has the highest number of consonants or vowels?
• How many times the word apple (only as an example) in this text?

As you go, you can set different or more questions based on the text. The text will help come up with the questions.

Try to be creative.

After you’ve set the questions, your child will comb through the text and find the answers. To make things more interesting, you could even get her a magnifying glass. This will enhance the mood as she will feel like a true detective.

To improve spelling and reading fluency, one must work simultaneously work on both of the literacy skills. Curious to learn more? Check out this article now!

 

Make the Choice

I think the name of this game doesn’t truly give you an idea of the game. It goes like this — the participant will have to say a particular word or remain silent based on the predetermined conditions.

For example, you could set the rule like this — “Only say sad, if the situation will make you sad, otherwise remain silent.”  

Then, you’ll describe the situations —

• Cleaning your bedroom.
• Your ice cream dropped to the ground.
• Getting a new toy as a gift.
• Your new toy just broke down.
• You won the first prize in the spelling competition.

Based on the situations, your student might speak out sad for the first, second, or the fourth option. For other options, she will remain silent.

This activity will help them implement words appropriately in different situations. Thus, they’ll connect more with the emotion that the word carries. Such practices are great for developing vocabulary.

This game becomes more fun with the increasing number of participants. That’s why you could consider this as one of the best classroom vocabulary activities.

We got the idea from the book Bringing Words to Life by Isabel L. Beck. You can find more vocabulary ideas from this book.

 

The Sorting Hat of Harry Potter

Are you a Potterhead? Well, we all love the fantastic world of Harry Potter, don’t we? This vocabulary activity idea is inspired by the sorting hat in the Harry Potter universe.

In Hogwarts, there is a sorting hat that decides the house of the students. Based on the characteristics and personal attributes, the sorting hat assigns the students to the houses — Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff.

So, how do you use this game in vocabulary practice?

You take several paper strips and write different characteristics attributes on each of those strips. For example, you could use words like — courage, cunning, intelligence, humble, etc.    

Then, put all of the strips inside a bag. You could use an actual hat to set the mood. The kids will pick one word and assign those words to the Hogwarts Houses. They will assume the role of the sorting hat. To make things more interesting, you could ask them why they have assigned a particular word to a house.

They will amaze you with their creativity and imagination!

 

Word Scavenger Hunt

This game shares some of the fundamentals with The Detective activity mentioned earlier. This game also requires a text. Rather than setting predetermined questions or clues, you’ll give them a wordlist.

The kids will have to find the words from the text. This technique will have a massive positive impact on their reading skills. That’s why this is one of the best vocabulary activities for ESL students.

 

Vocab Dice Rolling

This is another of the classroom vocabulary activities as kids in groups will enjoy this game greatly.

For this activity, you’ll need a wordlist and a die. You will disclose a word and ask the student to roll the die. Based on the result from the die, the student will perform either of these tasks —

• Draw it on the board,
• Determine the part of speech,
• Rhyme it with another word,
• Use it in a sentence,
• Offer a definition, or
• Act it out.

You could use other parameters like synonym and antonym. The choice is up to you. Also, you can divide the class into two groups and motivate them to compete against each other. You’ll see a clear increase in interest as you use it as a group competition.

 

Word Sneak

The credit for this vocabulary activity goes to Jimmy Fallon from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The game needs only two players and each is given a stack of random words. Then, the participants will have to carry out a conversation using those words.

Here’s the video where Jimmy plays the Word Sneak game with the British actor Ricky Gervais.

 

Using the Frayer Model

The Frayer Model is essentially a graphic organizer to identify and define unknown concepts. This model is applicable in many use cases. The original Frayer Model has four sections — definition, characteristics, examples, and non-examples.

You can easily modify the Frayer model and make it more usable in vocabulary activities. Just change the sections to — definition, part of speech, synonyms, and antonyms.

You may even use the Frayer model to create your custom-made dictionary. Surely, that would be a fun and educational experience.

 

Keeping a Vocabulary Journal

This not one of the vocabulary activities, but a vocabulary building strategy or a tip. As you practice the vocabulary activities, kids are learning a lot of new words. It’s better to record all the words in one place.

You can call it your vocabulary journal. This journal will help you keep track of the learning process and come up with new activities. You can also determine which teaching efforts are working and which are not.

Also, you can take a look at these educational websites, as they would help you with vocabulary activities online.

It’s not a secret that you need to have a good command over vocabulary to master a language. This statement is not only true for learning English but also stands true for learning every single language in the world.

The stronger vocabulary you have, the better you can express your thoughts to others. After having a substantial vocabulary, you should focus on learning the grammar.

The plan seems quite straightforward!

However, there is an issue. While there is a structure or pattern to follow for learning grammar, you can’t follow any pre-designed learning path for vocabulary. Rather, you can only learn new words and build vocabulary as you go.

So, how can you work on your vocabulary building?

While many suggest following the flashcard method, it doesn’t bear fruit in the long run. It happens as you’re only memorizing the words for the sake of memorizing. And, your brain doesn’t store them in the long-term memory reservoir as you don’t need (or use) those words in your everyday life.

That means there are two major hurdles on our path to vocabulary building. We don’t have any structured learning path and our brains simply erase the (forced) memorized words after a while.

Today, we’d look into these issues and unravel how we could effectively work on our vocabulary building.

 

Vocabulary Building Strategies

You might be thinking about grabbing a dictionary and start memorizing words and their meaning from page one. After all, we already know that it takes about 50 seconds to memorize a word. By that logic, you can build a vocabulary of 1000 new words in under 14 hours!

Doesn’t it seem a bit too easy?

Yes! And sadly, this method will not work in real life, unless you have the brain-power of a prodigy.

As you memorize a word and its meaning, you’re storing the information in short-term memory or working memory. After a while, our brains throw most of these pieces of information into the trash!

Why?

Because we don’t need that information to serve any particular cause.

This is the science behind why cramming words from the dictionary is one of the least effective vocabulary building methods.

Hmm … It seems that we need to come up with some vocabulary building strategies!

Here are some good strategies that you can follow —

 

Diversify Your Reading Efforts

Despite being a tedious and passive approach to vocabulary building, reading is by far one of the most effective strategies. But you need to understand the impact of diversifying your reading patterns.

For example, the detective and spy stories will contain words that introduce the readers to words specific to the crime and crime-solving genre. A reader might stumble upon words like — espionage, homicide, vandalism, arsonist, bribery, embezzlement, etc.  

On the other hand, if you read a romantic novel, you’ll get exposed to words related to emotions and feelings. In this case, you might see words like — angelic, alluring, adore, cherish, passion, infatuation, etc.  

Even if you’re reading academic books, you’re getting exposed to words relevant to that particular subject or topic.

To have a stronger vocabulary, you should read books from different genres. Plus, your reading materials should contain both fiction and non-fiction plots or settings.

You need to diversify.

This strategy will introduce you to more words fitting to different scenarios and circumstances — creating an all-encompassing vocabulary building strategy.

You should start working on spelling and reading practice simultaneously as spelling supports reading. 

Be More Aware of Words While Reading

Do you feel like having a poor vocabulary despite you read a lot? You’re not the only one — many of us face the same issue.

This is because we only focus on reading but not on the — quality of reading. If you become more aware while reading, you start to focus on every word that the writer has used.

For example, let’s consider this sentence — “Sarah’s callous remark on Phoebe’s struggle with depression astounded everyone in the room.”  Now, let’s assume that you don’t know the meaning of callous and astounded in this sentence.

But you are very clever and can understand the context without knowing the meaning of every word in a sentence. Here, the context suggests that — Sarah made “some kind of weird comment” and everyone is in shock.

Although you’ve successfully guessed the meaning of the sentence, you just missed an opportunity to learn the word callous and astounded.

As you’re reading, you should try to gather as many words as possible into your vocabulary. This is one of the best ways for vocabulary building. Plus, you’ll not have to actively memorize words but use the context in your favor. You’ll see more effective results in this way.

 

Use Visual Cues

The fundamental of this vocabulary building strategy is quite simple — associate mental images with words. This strategy shares core philosophy with the mind palace memorizing strategy.

For example, let’s consider the word callous from the previous section. Now that you know the meaning of the word to be heartless or cold-hearted, you can associate a movie villain with this word.

Here’s an idea — think of Thanos (the villain in the Avengers movies) when you read or hear the word callous.

You can use scenes from movies or TV shows, comic books, memes, or events in your life. The only limit is your imagination.

This technique will help you memorize words and recall their meanings with ease. So, from the next time, associate newly learned words with visual images.

 

Implement the Newly Learned Words in Different Cases

If you don’t use newly learned words, you’ll eventually forget them. It doesn’t matter which vocabulary building strategies you’ve used. You’ll forget the words that you don’t use.

So, whenever you learn a new word, try to use that word in different cases. You could use that in essays, exams, journals, or even while talking to others.

For example, let’s again think of the word callous. We don’t use that word very often while talking to others. Rather, we prefer using cold-blooded or heartless. But that doesn’t mean you can use it. Use callous instead of heartless from the next time.

It will diversify your speech and make you sound smarter! But most importantly, that word will store in your vocabulary permanently.

 

Have a Dictionary by Your Side

If you want to improve your skills and work on your vocabulary building, you must have a dictionary by your side. A good dictionary can be your best English teacher. You could either get a physical copy of a dictionary or rely on an online dictionary. Most of the popular dictionaries now have apps too.

The main idea is to have quick access to your dictionary. In this way, you can instantly look up an unknown word. Apart from the meaning of the word, you should also check the synonyms and check how that word is typically used in a sentence.

Some of the good dictionaries also offer historical evidence of the words. For example, the word Callous comes for the Latin word Callus.  And, it was added to the English language in the 1800s.

These pieces of information also help you remember the word in different ways. The more information you have about a word, the more sources you’ll have to associate the word.

However, make sure that your dictionary of choice is a good reputation and comes with a wide collection of words. A cheap dictionary (in terms of quality) will do more harm than good.

 

Use the Common Vocabulary Building Activities

Apart from the clever strategies and vocabulary building examples mentioned above, you can incorporate the common vocabulary building activities too.

For example, having a strong sense of prefix, suffix, and root words will help you add a cluster of words to your word collection. For example, the root word, depend changes its meaning with the addition of suffix (dependent, depended, depending) and prefix (independent).

Then, you can learn more about the language families and the words coming from different languages. This vocabulary building activity is better known as the study of etymology.

You can learn about more vocabulary activities in this article. Make sure to check it out.

 

Consider Participating in Vocabulary Building Exercises

Vocabulary building is a long and tedious process. You can’t have a wide collection of words within days — it takes years to build up a strong vocabulary.

That’s why you should participate in vocabulary building exercises. These exercises will help you with spaced repetition and frequent exposure to the words.

The spelling section of SpellQuiz uses dictation as the key vocabulary building activity. Dictation will help your listening and writing skills as well. So, you’re basically practicing four skills at the same time — listening, writing, spelling, and vocabulary building.

With SpellQuiz, you can also participate in vocabulary building games online. The SBO or Spelling Bee Online is an online multiplayer game that allows you to showcase your spelling prowess as you play against players from all around the world. By showing you spelling skills, you can have your name on the leaderboard too.

Teaching English spelling is a daunting challenge, especially to the kids. A lot of it has to do with the mismatching correlation between the spellings and the pronunciations.

For example, let’s consider the word “knee.” It might sound like “nee” but it spelling suggests something like “kuh – nee!”

We, adults, are already familiar with unusual spellings — we know that there’ a silent K in knife and knee. But kids are only getting to know these rules and laws.

So today, we would try to talk about some of the established spelling rules.

 

How Many Spelling Rules Are There in the English Language?

You should understand one thing — there is no fixed number of hard and fast rules when it comes to English spelling. Linguistic experts have only identified and categorized some spelling patterns.

That’s why you’re seeing different numbers online!

Some are preaching 5 Spelling rules, some talk about 31 spelling rules, and so on. Also, the English language has its fair share of exceptions when comes to spelling grammar.

How so?

There is a common spelling rule that says English words don’t end in I. If that’s true, what about the words — alumni, broccoli, or graffiti? Some may argue that these words are originated from other languages.

True! But it’s also true that the English language has picked these words.

As we’re talking about exceptions, let’s talk about the doubling consonant issue. Some suggest that while adding suffixes, like -ed or -ing after a verb, you should double the final consonant.

Thus, refer becomes referred, or incur becomes incurring following this rule.

Nice! Oh wait, there’s an issue!

What about enter?

It doesn’t become enterred or enterring! Rather, it becomes entered or entering.

This why many experts refrain from making every spelling pattern a rule. And, that’s why we don’t have a fixed of spelling rules in the English language.

So, while studying the English spelling rules, you should always keep in mind that — rules are made to be broken!

But mastering the common spelling rules will help the language users in many ways. You can stop yourself from making common and silly mistakes.

 

7 Basic Spelling Rules for Kids

1. Every Syllable (And Word) Must Have One Vowel

Example: It, cat, old — all have a vowel.

2. I, E, or Y Changes the Sound of C to /s/

The letter C has two sounds — /s/ or /k/. If C is followed by I, E, or Y, it sounds like /s/. in all other cases, it sounds like /k/.

Example: City, cement, and cyber (C followed by I, E, or Y) have the /s/ sound — but cold, catch, or cool has the /k/ sound.  

3. I, E, or Y Changes the Sound of G to /j/

Similar to the previous rule, the letter G has two sounds — /g/ or /j/. So, if G is followed by I, E, or Y, it sounds like /j/. Otherwise, it has the /g/ sound.

Example: Gist, gem, and gyro (G followed by I, E, or Y) have the /j/ sound — but game, get, or good has the /g/ sound. 

4. Q and U Are Used in Pairs! (Has Exceptions)

The letter Q is almost always paired with the letter U in the English language. So, blindly put a U after every time you spell anything with a Q.

Example: Queen, Quit, Quite, Quill — all of these words have Q and U paired together.

Exceptions: faqir, cinq, qi – these words don’t follow the QU pairing rule. However, all of these words have different etymological roots.

5. -CK Is Used Only After a Short Vowel

There two ways to create the sound /k/ at the end of the words — using -CK or -K. Which one should you use?

Remember one thing — -CK is used only after a short vowel!

So, after short vowels, that sound like — -ah, -eh, -ih, -oh, and -uh, you’ll use -CK. But we use -K after long vowels.  

Example: Sack, deck, pick, rock, buck — these words have at the end -CK as there are short vowels. But words like meek, milk, book, hook — these words have -K at the end.

6. F, L, And S Doubles at the End of Mono-Syllable Words

Mono-syllable or one-syllable words are the words with one vowel. Now, if such a mono-syllable word ends with the letters F, L, or S, they become double!

Example: Riff, spell, fuss — are mono-syllable words ending with F, L, and S.

Exceptions: Bus, sis.

7. Capitalize Proper Nouns

Proper nouns, meaning the names of people, titles, places, or things must be capitalized.

Example: Jerry, Tom, President, London, Bitcoin — these proper nouns have capital letters in the beginning.

Are you looking for a spelling baseline assessment? Here’s a guide that discusses everything revolving around the topic with a convenient way for conducting one. 

 

5 Spelling Rule for Adults

1. I Before E, Except After C [*Not A Rule but A Spelling Tip!]

This is perhaps one of the most well-known spelling rules of the English language. And, there is a strong reason behind this. Despite the age, a large portion of English users often get confused with the IE or EI issue.

Let’s be honest, even you got confused while spelling words like believe or receive without any auto-correct tool.

So, the extended version of this spelling rule goes like this — I before E, except after C, or sounds like A.

That makes everything simple, write?

Despite having a three-layer guideline, there a number of words that don’t follow this spelling pattern. For example, weird, foreign, or leisure don’t follow the spelling pattern.

Example: Field, believe, lie, piece — I before E. Receive, ceiling, deceit — uses EI as there is a C. Neighbor, beige, weigh — sounds like A so EI is used.

Exceptions: As we said earlier, this is one of the spelling tips, not a concrete rule. There is a long list of exceptions to this spelling tip. This list should help you out (try to memorize them if you can) —

Exceptions of the I before E, except after C rule
Seize	Weird
Height	Foreign
Leisure	Conscience
Counterfeit	Forfeit
Neither	Science
Species	Sufficient

 

2. Spelling Rules for Adding Suffixes After the Words Ending with Y

Words ending with Y change in different ways as you add suffixes to them. So, we’d break this one rule multiple layers —

2(A). e-Based Suffixes (-er, -est, -ed, -es) Change the Y to I

Example: Cry > cried (-ed), dry > dried (-ed), baby > babies (-es), story > stories (-es), ugly > uglier (-er) > ugliest (-est).

2(B). -ing Suffix Doesn’t Change The Y

Example: Cry > crying, dry > drying, fry > frying.

2(C). -ly Suffix Changes the Y to I

Example: Happy > happily, merry > merrily, sloppy > sloppily, scary > scarily.  

Exceptions: Dry > dryly, shy > shyly.   

2(D). -ment Suffix Doesn’t Change the Y

Example: Employ > employment, enjoy > enjoyment, repay > repayment, deploy > deployment.

Exception: Merry > merriment.

3. Spelling Rules for Plural Nouns (-s or -es?)

This is another confusing spelling issue for the adults. Should we be using -s or -es for nouns?

Follow this one rule — add -es for words ending with -s, -sh, -x, -z, or -ch.

Everything else uses -s.

Example: Boss > bosses, dish > dishes, box > boxes, batch > batches — has -s, -sh, -x, -ch in the end. Monkey > monkeys, boy > boys.

Exceptions for the Spellings of Plural Nouns (Ending with -es or -s)
Singular	Plural
Mango	Mango/Mangoes (both are correct!)
Tomato	Tomatoes
Dwarf	Dwarves/Dwarfs (both are correct)
Knife	Knives
Wife	Wives
Embargo	Embargoes
Torpedo	Torpedoes
Volcano	Volcanos/Volcanoes (both are correct)
Echo	Echos/Echoes (both are correct)

 

4. Only Use Double Consonant While Adding Suffix for One-Syllable Words

There are many arguments regarding whether to use double consonant or not while adding the -ed or -ing suffixes.

To be on the safer side, you should only double the ending consonant for one-syllable words.

Example: Gut > gutted, rub > rubbed, rob > robbing, mop > mopping.

Exceptions: Burn > burning.  

5. Drop the Silent E in the End While Adding a Vowel Suffix

A lot of English words have silent E in the end. As you add a suffix, this silent E gets dropped.

Example: Bite > biting, care > cared, race > racing, come > coming.  

Expectations: Noticeable, truly.

Common misconceptions and False spelling rules

Many sources strongly enforce different spelling rules that are baseless and can easily be debunked. Here are some of these false spelling rules —

1. No English word has double I in it!

Proof that it’s false: Radii, skiing, shiitake.

 

2. English words don’t end in I, U, V, or J.

Proof that it’s false: Hi (ends in I), Emu (ends in U), Rev (ends in V), Hajj (ends in J)  

 

3. Consonant suffixes don’t the spelling.

Proof that it’s false: Argue > argument, judge > judgment/judgement (both are correct).

 

4. The silent E in the end always gets dropped while adding a suffix.

Proof that it’s false: Mile > mileage, canoe > canoeing.

 

5. In a compound word (room and mate form roommate, house and keeper form housekeeper), spellings of the separate words always remain unchanged.

Proof that it’s false: Past + time > pastime, where + ever > wherever.

Does your child have her eyes glued to the phone or laptop screens? It’s one of the most common issues that modern parents are facing. What could you even do? She can’t help but dance with — Baby shark, doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo …

Rather than panicking and taking drastic measures, you could use this habit of her to teach them interesting things and promote curiosity. You must understand one thing — everything is modernizing and using electronic devices for education is the way forward.

Today, we’d talk about some of the best online resources and educational websites. You should take note of these websites and use the appropriate ones for your child’s education.   

As the list of education websites is quite long, we’ve divided the list into categories. This should help you find the best educational websites with ease.

 

Personalized Learning Oriented Educational Websites (Offers Complete Solutions)

The first category of websites serves as jack of all trades! Here, you can find courses and lessons on — math, science, economics, arts, language skills, and even life skills. These websites prefer calling them personalized learning-focused websites.

 

Khan Academy

Website Link: https://www.khanacademy.org/

Grade Level: PreK – 12

Cost: Free

Khan Academy is surely one of the finest educational websites out there. It is also one of the most renowned websites out there. The main reason behind the popularity is the vision and goal of the organization.

Salman Khan, the visionary behind this website, started small with simple tutorial videos in 2008. In fact, this hedge fund analyst with degrees from MIT and Harvard, started shooting videos to help his cousin Nadia with math. Very soon, he became “the math teacher” of the world.

Now, you can find personalized courses on hundreds of topics in Khan Academy. The lessons are divided into two sections — learn and practice. Kids can learn things through beautifully animated videos and then track their progress through practice sessions.

The quality of the videos is the best feature of Khan Academy — very few websites have the concepts so clearly explained.

Another strong feature of Khan Academy is that the website is free as they live by the motto — free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere.

 

IXL

Website Link: https://www.ixl.com

Grade Level: PreK – 12

Cost: $19.95/month (for families) for four core subjects

IXL is another big name among the online education platforms. Also, IXL is one of the oldest EdTech platforms.

IXL mainly covers five learning areas — math, language arts, science, social studies, and Spanish. The platform has designed different curriculum suitable for different grade levels. For example, their first-grade curriculum teaches kids simple addition and subtraction. Then, their eighth-grade curriculum teaches plotting graphs from equations.

These curriculums are designed by veteran educators and teachers from the USA. Also, these education standards precisely meet the demands of States education standards.

So, you can use IXL as an additional tool for the students to ace the exams. However, the many parents think that IXL to be quite expensive. Still, IXL is one of the great websites for kids.

 

BrainPOP

Website Link: https://www.brainpop.com/

Grade Level: PreK – 12

Cost: $19.95/month (for families) for BrainPOP Combo

BrainPOP takes more interactive approach for teaching different subjects. On the fundamental level, BrainPOP works in the similar fashion as IXL. But rather than focusing on the text-based lessons, BrainPOP uses videos for better learning experience.

Also, BrainPOP takes step further by combining multiple approaches of learning in every lesson. For examples, one can — learn through movies, participate in quiz or a challenge, read more on related topics, practice the vocabulary used in the lesson, and many more.  

Such a comprehensive approach makes BrainPOP better than many other platforms.

However, BrainPOP doesn’t indicate grade-levels associated with the lessons. So, a child will definitely need an adult’s support. Again, just like IXL, the cost could be an issue for many users.

 

MobyMax

Website Link: https://www.mobymax.com/

Grade Level: PreK – 8

Cost: $7.99/month (for families)

MobyMax proposes an alternate solution compared to IXL and BrainPOP. Rather than focusing teaching the core subjects and lessons, MobyMax heavily focus on differentiated learning to close gaps.

What does it mean?

It means students can take “extra” lessons here to according to their own pace. Mainly, it’s another form of adaptive learning. To incorporate this technique, MobyMax first asks the participants to take an initial assessment test. After the one-hour-long assessment, the algorithm assigns a learning path to the participants.

Despite being a newer educational platform, MobyMax has managed to grab eyes of millions and have own over 155 awards.

Moreover, MobyMax takes a robust approach with broader subject areas — it covers 27 subjects. The best part is the pricing which starts at $7.99 per month for the families.

 

Education.com

Website Link: https://www.education.com/

Grade Level: PreK – 7

Cost: $15.99/month (for families)

As you’re looking educational websites, being interested on Education.com certainly makes sense. Education.com is a sub-brand of IXL Learning. But rather than following the same footstep, Education.com heavily uses activities and visual aids for teaching.

Plus, Education.com has a rich collection of — worksheets, games, lessons plans, activities, workbooks, songs, and stories.

Overall, Education.com is more interactive and takes the modern approach for teaching young kids.

 

Read More: What Are the Best Language Learning Apps?

Digital Libraries

Project Gutenberg

Website Link: https://www.gutenberg.org/

Grade Level: N/A

Cost: free

Books was and always will be the best resource for learning. As we’re talking about books and online libraries, Project Gutenberg’s name is sure to come.

Project Gutenberg is non-profit effort that has a massive collection of 60,000 eBooks that are completely free. You can either download or read online from any device. This website is as simple as it gets!

You might be wondering about the copyright issue, right?

Project Gutenberg only has the books for which the U.S. copyright has expired or the publisher has given rights to use the books for non-profit purposes.  

 

ReadingIQ

Website Link: https://www.readingiq.com/

Age Level: 2 -12 years

Cost: $7.99/month

If you’ve visited Project Gutenberg’s website, you might be a bit disappointed now! Despite having large collection, Project Gutenberg doesn’t have much to offer to the kids.

If you’re looking for comics or colorful children’s books, ReadingIQ should be the place to go. This platform has a vast collection of 7,000 books all catering towards the needs of children.

After all, a five-year-old will love reading 101 Dalmatians and Toy Story more than Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

However, this platform is not free and you’ll have to buy a subscription to have access to the library.

 

Educational Games and Activities

PBS Kids

Website Link: https://pbskids.org/

Age Level: 3 -10 years

Cost: free

Kids love to watch funny cartoon videos or play games, right? In that case, you should consider paying visit to PBS Kids. Here, you can find tons of educational videos and learning games.

The design of website is very minimalistic so that children can browse on their own and play their favorite games. The games are quite easy and designed to help the kids learn different concepts with fun.

 

ABCMouse

Website Link: https://www.abcmouse.com/

Age Level: 2-8

Cost: $9.95/month (for family)

ABCMouse is an extremely resourceful PreK centric learning platform. This platfrom boasts of over 10,000 learning activities and 850 compact lessons. The learning path and leveled learning are the two pillars of ABCMouse.

You can check out the detailed ABCMouse review from here.

 

ABCYa

Website Link: https://www.abcya.com/

Grade Level: PreK – 6+

Cost: free or $5.83/month (for family)

If you’re specifically looking for kids games, ABCYa is the one of the best kids websites. ABCYa is a special website from ABCMouse that specializes in various games focusing on math, logical analysis, science, and others.

While ABCMouse is targeted for educational activities, ABCYa is only about games and having fun. You can also use ABCYa for free if the ads don’t bother you.

 

Curious World

Website Link: https://www.curiousworld.com/

Age Level: 2-7

Cost: $7.99/month (for family)

Curious World is a personalized learning app that promotes curiosity among the PreK children. The strongest features of Curious World is the high-quality animations and quality of the games and videos. Plus, kids can read different stories too.

The downside of this app is that there is no app available for Android devices. You must own an Apple device to us the app.

 

Agnitus

Website Link: http://www.agnitus.com/

Grade Level: PreK – 3

Cost: $6.99/month or $129.99 lifetime access

Agnitus is another award-winning kids’ educational platform that offers a 1,000+ games and learning activities on math and literacy skills. The animation quality top-notch and follows the modern design philosophy.

On top of everything, parents can track progress quite easily with its robust tracking tools.

However, this app can’t meet the needs of older kids.  

 

Curiosity-Driven

TED-ED

Website Link: https://ed.ted.com/

Grade Level: Elementary to University

Cost: free

TED-ED is on mission to spread knowledge and provoke curiosity. Its true that TED-ED doesn’t help the children learning the different subjects, like — math or science. However, this is the best platform for learning the core human philosophy and thought-provoking concepts.

For example, kids can learn about what is depression, psychology of narcissism, or the science of laziness.  

TED-ED will help your child become curious about the world and have a positive approach towards life.

 

Exploratorium

Website Link: https://www.exploratorium.edu/

Grade Level: 5 – 12

Cost: free

Exploratorium is one of the leaders that thrive on motivating kids with scientific experiments. It has a massive collection of over 35,000 experiments and projects that kids will love to take part in.

Such initiative is extremely helpful to encourage the kids on STEM studies.

 

NASA Kids Club

Website Link: https://www.nasa.gov/kidsclub/index.html

Grade Level: PreK – 4

Cost: free

We’re all familiar with the reputation of NASA. Almost every child dreams of becoming an adventurer — exploring the world and unknown planets, and maybe even meeting an alien!

NASA Kids Club aims to educate and motivate the children from all over globe regarding STEM studies. The platform is especially great for educating the kids about space and how universe works. Considering the influence and materials, NASA Kids Club is one of the best educational websites for elementary students.

 

Language and Arts

ABC Reading Eggs

Website Link: https://readingeggs.com.au/

Age Level: 3 -7

Cost: $10.81/month (AU $13.99/month)

ABC Reading Eggs is one of the strongest educational websites focused teaching kids how to read. Kids almost always struggle when they are just learning to read.  

ABC Reading Eggs uses games, songs and activities that support the children with reading. Plus, it has a huge collection of over 2500 eBooks and 500 worksheets.

 

FarFaria

Website Link: https://www.farfaria.com/

Age Level: 3+

Cost: $4.99/month

FarFaria is one of the most unique educational websites. This website has over 1,000 books and stories that kids love to read. FarFaria uses beautiful illustrations so that kids enjoy their reading time.

Also, kids can use the Read to Me feature where veteran narrators will read the story to them.  

 

SpellQuiz

Website Link: https://spellquiz.com/

Grade Level: 1 – 12

Cost: Free, Paid — $12.95/month or $119.95/year (for parents), $15.95/month or $149.95/year (for teachers with 2 licenses), $29.95/month or $299.00/year (for teachers with 25 licenses)

SpellQuiz is one of the strongest educational websites that focus on English spelling and vocabulary. Apart from having the most powerful vocabulary assessment tool and most comprehensive spelling practice tools, kids can also prepare for the Spelling Bee.

Plus, kids can participate in Spelling Bee Online — the real-time virtual spelling competition that is completely free.

Moreover, you can teach idioms with examples, fun quizzes, and help the children with a wide collection of spelling words.

 

Bonus – Best YouTube Educational Channels

• Veritasium — Teaches topics on physics and applied science.
• Mark Rober — Former NASA and Apple engineer, teaching interesting engineering topics to kids.
• Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell — Has a large collection of educational animation videos.
• Minute Physics — Teaches difference facts and concepts of physics with minute-long videos.
• Crash Course — Another great channel that explains different educational concepts with wonderful animations.

As kids start to develop phonemic awareness, their spelling skills gradually get better and better. With the newly developed awareness, they can guess the probable spelling of unknown words.

We, adults, are quite familiar with the idea — how to associate letters and their respective sound to form words, even the unknown ones. But never actually paid attention to the fact how we developed this skill.

There are tons of ways to develop and sharpen phonological awareness. Today, we’d discuss an unconventional approach to developing phonemic awareness. As you can guess from the title of this article, we’re talking about inventive spelling.

Among all of the phonemic awareness development approaches, inventive spelling sits at an odd position. Some orthodox teachers and parents even forbid introducing inventive spelling to the kids.

Inventive spelling might indeed act as a double-edged sword. So, let’s consider all the facts and analyze should we even take incorporate inventive spelling in spelling training. And, if so, what are the best ways to use this approach.

 

What Is Inventive Spelling?

Inventive spelling is the practice of “inventing” the spelling of an existing word by only focusing on the sound/pronunciation of that word. That means you’ll just your sense of letter-sound correspondence and come up with the spellings of the words.

For example, let’s assume that you don’t know the exact spelling of the word — different. However, your sense of letter-sound coordination suggests that the word should contain the letters — D, I, F, R, N, and T — in this particular order.

So, you reinvent the spelling of the word as — DIFRENT.    

What you did is basically inventive spelling!

Children are born curious and they tend to do this a lot in the earlier days of school. As they easily forget the spelling of the words, they resort to inventing the spelling of the words themselves.

Some adults, both teachers and parents, frown upon such practice. They think that inventing the spelling of the words is a bad habit of misspelling and it should be corrected immediately!

Although kids are basically misspelling the words through inventive spelling, this spelling approach is one of the better tools for developing phonemic awareness. Also, kids often can guess the correct spelling of different words just by sticking to their intuition of the spelling of the words.

Eager to participate in spelling and reading age tests? Check out this article on spelling and reading connection now!

 

Why Is Inventive Spelling Important?

Almost every single child struggles with English spelling in the early days of education. And, a lot of these spelling issues are connected to their lack of knowledge of phonemes and letter-sound coordination.

As they grow up, their start to adapt to the letters and how these sound within a word. So, developing phonological awareness is a great way to solve the issue.

Now, inventive spelling directly impacts phonological awareness. Children can understand the individual sound of the words and join these sounds to form words. It’s true that inventive spelling might encourage students to misspell but they can sort out that issue by getting familiar with the correct spelling with experience.

However, the biggest positive thing about inventive spelling is that it encourages the children to express their thoughts without the fear of being judged. As there is no hard and fast law for spelling in this regime, children write down words and sentences as they please.

Such freedom cultivates creativity.

Studies show that the practice of inventive spelling in kindergarten improves concurrent reading with alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness. Another study suggests that inventive spelling helps the children to read by themselves.  

So, despite being an unorthodox approach, inventive spelling is a proven tool for improving spelling and reading skills.

Read More: What is phonemic awareness?

 

The Dangers of Overusing Inventive Spelling and How to Solve Them

You might be wondering what if kids love their invented spellings so much that they refuse to use the correct spellings?

It’s possible that kids could hand on to their incorrect spelling.

Of course, using the spelling — strait or stret, instead of straight — seems logical to the kids.

Here’s a good way to solve this issue — ask the children to guess the spelling first — before introducing them to the correct one. This solution can even be seen as a word game.

However, teacher and parents should take the long road here.

First, they should give the kids free roams. Just ask them to write things. It doesn’t matter whether they are using the correct or incorrect spelling.

Your primary focus should be not to discourage their enthusiasm for writing. The correction phase will come later.

At the same time, you should also be encouraging them to read — as much as possible. As they reading more and more, their brains will automatically remember the correct spelling.

It’s also a likely scenario that kids will self-correct their spelling gradually.

In fact, the regular stages of spelling development suggest that misspelling is a natural part of learning how to spell.

If you’re eager to find more vocabulary activities for kids like inventive spelling, you should read this article. 

 

5 Stages of Spelling Development

Kids don’t jump-start from spelling the correct spelling of the words initially. They go through a transition — from zero knowledge about the alphabet and sounds to adept at using correct spelling.

A 1982 research by Dr. J. Richard Gentry, Spelling Genius at Work, breaks the complete transition into 5 stages —

• Pre-communicative stage
• Semi-phonetic stage
• Phonetic stage
• Transitional stage
• Correct stage

 

Pre-Communicative Stage

This is the earliest stage of spelling and children in this stage doesn’t have any idea how or spelling work. In fact, they don’t even have a good command over the complete alphabet.

In this stage, children —

• Getting familiar with the letters
• Yet to figure out how letters form words
• Don’t have any idea about left-to-right writing orientation

What you will see if you ask them to write —

• Meaningless symbols
• Poorly shaped or deformed letters

 

Semi-Phonetic Stage

In the second stage of spelling, children understand that letters have respective sounds and have a command over the complete alphabet. Also, they are capable of using logic to come up with letters that represent a word.

In this stage, children —

• Adept in alphabet
• Tries to find the connection between letters and respective sounds
• Familiar with the left-to-right writing orientation

What you will see if you ask them to write —

• Upper-case or lower-case letter writing capabilities
• MM for mommy, or U for you

 

Phonetic Stage

In the third stage, children are able to use letters to represent words or syllables in a word. Their sense of letter-sound coordination begins to develop in this stage. Plus, they can identify different letter groups too, such as — cat, fat, mat, rat, etc.

In this stage, children —

• Develop letter-sound coordination
• Might form simple two-three letter words
• Start to correspond letters or group of letters to a particular sound

What you will see if you ask them to write —

• Successfully writing short words — at, it, I, ant, hi, etc.
• Fon for phone, kek for cake, pnd for pond

Note: This is the ideal stage to introduce them with inventive spelling.

 

Transitional Stage

In the transitional stage, children get familiar with the common word patterns and structures. For example, kids rarely misspell patterned words like — cake, take, make, bake, etc.   

Also, they can successfully write three to four-letter words.  

 In this stage, children —

• Adept at spelling three-four letter words
• Able to identify common spelling patterns and word groups
• Transitions from inventive spelling to correct spelling

What you will see if you ask them to write —

• Successfully writing short words — cake, take, make, bake, etc.
• Might make simple mistakes, like — afternewn for afternoon, tomoro for tomorrow, comiti for committee, etc.

 

Correct Stage

This is the final stage for developing spelling. Here, kids generally don’t make spelling mistakes of the words that they’ve collected in their vocabulary. This is the pinnacle of their English orthographic knowledge.  

To master spelling skills, one must be aware of all the common spelling rules. 

 

How Do You Teach Inventive Spelling?

The idea behind implementing inventive spelling is fairly simple. The teachers or parents only need to encourage the kids to write texts, disregarding the spelling or grammatical boundaries.

The goal is to motivate them to write more. Their intuition about phonemes will guide them through hard spelling words.  

Plus, the teacher and parents shouldn’t correct their spelling afterwards. It might demotivate the kids as they feel judged. You can solve the spelling issues later through proper spelling exercises.