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KS2 Spelling Activities
Are you a teacher looking for KS2 spelling activities to use with your class? Well, you’re in luck! We’ve compiled a list of loads of fun ways to help your KS2 children embed tricky spelling words.
Ordering letters
Giving children the letters from their chosen spelling words and challenging them to arrange them into the correct order is a great way to help familiarise them with the spellings. Depending on whether they are in lower KS2 or upper KS2, you may wish to only provide the letters contained in the word, or a range of letters the children must pick from. Here are a couple of fun ways to do this:
- Provide children with letter tiles and challenge them to order the letters into the correct spelling. Scrabble tiles are great for this or you can use these free downloadable letter tiles.
- Give each child a sheet of A4 paper displaying one letter from a particular word. Can the children arrange themselves so that the word is spelled correctly?
- Play Bananagrams! Similar to Scrabble (but much faster paced!), this involves children creating words out of letter tiles and connecting them in a crossword formation.
Make it memorable
Many KS2 children find it very helpful to have visual guides or other devices to help them with tricky spellings and homophones, such as this visual guide to the ever-problematic ‘there, they’re, their’:
Another great spelling activity to help make tricky words memorable is to create mnemonics. Some mnemonics take each letter in a word and assign a new word to each letter to make the spelling more memorable. For example:
- BECAUSE: Big Elephants Cause Accidents Under Smaller Elephants.
- RHYTHM: Rhythm Has Your Two Hips Moving
Why not challenge your class to create their own mnemonics to help them remember words they are struggling with?
Here are some other helpful ways of remembering some of those commonly misspelled words:
- neCeSSary: one Collar and two Sleeves
- ‘-ould’ words, like would, should and could: O U Lucky Duck!
- ‘Never believe a lie’
- Said: Silly Ants In Dresses
- ‘A really good friend stays right to the end’
- ‘An island is land with water around it’
- Special: the CIA are special agents
Word games
Playing word games is a great KS2 spelling activity that will have them reinforcing words without them even realising they are working!
- Boggle: create a 3x3 grid by muddling up the letters from any 9-letter word on a spelling list, such as ‘important’, ‘existence’, ‘guarantee’, ‘vegetable’ or ‘neighbour’. Challenge children to find as many words as they can from the nine letters (using each letter only once per word), with the added challenge of finding the nine-letter word.
- Word searches: create a word search with the spellings you want children to focus on. There are lots of websites, like this one, that will make the word search for you if you just enter the words you would like to include.
- Board games: choose one of the boards from this Educational Games FreeBee Pack and give pairs of children dice and word lists. Taking it in turns, children to read one of the words to their partner. If the other child spells the word correctly, they can roll the dice and move that number of spaces. If not, they stay where they are. The winner is the first child to get to the end of the board.
- Table tennis spelling: in pairs, children to imagine they are playing table tennis but they bat letters instead of balls! They take it in turns to ping pong each letter in a word in order to each other until they have spelt the word between them.
Other ideas:
Spelling Art: draw an overlapping wiggly line with space in each section you create. Choose one word for each sentence and challenge children to write the word as many times as they can within each section.
Word rank: from a range of spelling words, ask children to rank them from what they think are the easiest to spell to the hardest. Try to identify why the words at the bottom are hardest and work on these first. Children could write them out, identifying the trickiest letters and making sure to write these letters larger than the others.
Silly sentences: make up silly sentences that use all the words from a given list of spellings. What’s the silliest sentence you can make?!
If you’re looking for more English resources for your KS2 classroom, check out our full catalogue of KS2 English lesson planning packs, or English FreeBees.
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