their heads round and round faster and faster and ask them to smile and say “yessss….” and get them to clench their hand into a fist.
Then ask them to imagine feeling like this when they are learning something new – to relax and to breathe deeply and to imagine learning their spellings easily and effortlessly without any effort ‘ without any struggle knowing that they have learnt a really easy strategy for remembering their spellings magically now.
Now get them to open their eyes.
Spelling is a visual skill and excellent spellers always go through the same strategy so by learning the steps and following what excellent spellers do your child is going to learn to spell new words easily too.
Magical Spelling Made Easy
Get some paper and break the word up into blocks of 3 or 4 letters with each block being a different colour and slightly spaced apart. Let’s practise with a difficult word to prove it too you !
Chry san the mum
Show only one block of letters at a time and cover the others up.
Now stand behind your child and hold the piece of paper up high to the left with those 3 or 4 letters and then move the paper down to the right and up to the left again asking them to move their eyes up and down just relaxing and looking at the colourful letters. (I do this by pointing whilst saying “now look up here”) Your child can do this for themselves once they’ve got the idea
Get them to make the letters bigger in their imagination or brighter or flashing on and off
Say the letters out loud
Ask them to close their eyes