Understanding spelling, punctuation and grammar is one of the key areas covered in KS2. As your child moves into Upper KS2 and starts to reach the end of their primary school journey, it might feel like intensive task to equip them with SPaG skills. Fortunately, we’ve put together a few easy activities to help your child become a whizz at spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Continue reading below to find out our top tips and tricks on how you can help your child with their SpaG skills.
1. Do spelling games together
Spelling games are a great way to teach your children how to spell words, as it creates a low-pressure and fun environment. Remember, it is important to engage learning without stress. A great benefit of this technique, is that they can be done online or just with a pen & paper. BBC Bitesize is a good go-to for entertaining online spelling games, although this should be done in moderation and as part of your child’s daily screen time. In addition, Pinterest is a useful place to search for inspiration for offline SpaG games. For example, find ways to make your own themed word-search with your child , or printable crosswords. Or for the more advanced spellers, a simple game of Scrabble or Boggle could do the trick!
2. The ‘look, cover, write, check’ trick
Simple yet extremely effective, this method can be used regardless of the difficulty of the spelling word. To get started, simply select a word for your child to spell. Let them look at the word for a minute to familiarise themselves, then cover the word. Next, have your child spell out the word from memory next to the covered word, and uncover to see if they have written the word correctly. Whilst not as fun as online scrabble, this exceptionally easy technique can be done in any learning environment, whether it’s at home or on the go.
3. Read along together
There’s nothing that brings people together like reading. Simply have your child select a book, get comfy and read along together. Going through a book can help your child with spelling, punctuation and grammar. By reading together, children are able to build up understanding or grammatical rules in action, see how punctuation can work in context and see examples of tricky words to help with spelling. Short stories are best to start with, and is makes it much easier to measure your child’s progress as they move onto to long-form books.
4. Help with homework
Helping your child with their homework is an extremely effective way to help your child with their spelling. Regularly reading through their work and underlining any words that are incorrect can help develop a feel for whether words look right. You could also work with your child by asking them to write down any words that they need to remember and can also help them as the physical act of writing words down helps the word stick to memory.
5. Use different learning techniques
Learning how to spell takes time and is a gradual process and as all children are different, writing words down over again may not be the best method for some. For example, your child may be a visual learner; This is is when for a concept to sink in, they need to be able to see it – or at least visualise it. Or, your child might perform best with verbal learning instead, i.e. Sounding out each word to understand it. whereas others may be a verbal larder where they need to sound each word out loud. Therefore, it is important to find the right resources for your child, for example a visual learner may require a word mat or writing words out repeatedly in different colours. You could even make pocket cards with your child, where you create small cards to fit in your pocket or bag and you ask your child to spell out the words to you when you randomly pick one at any point throughout the
day.
6. Utilising free educational resources
Alongside classwork, offline enrichment is a great way to introduce slow-learning and understanding of spelling and grammar to pupils. To get started, download one of our free Spelling & Grammar Packs for Year 3-6. Aligned and focused on all core SpaG concepts, pupils can work independently focusing and become more confident spellers.
Download one of our free KS2 SpaG Packs below
