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Third grade is an important transitional time in school. This is usually the grade when children have already learned to read, and now they will be learning through reading instead. Since spelling is a big part of reading comprehension, third grade spelling help is very important.

DuBois, Erickson & Jacobs (2007) noticed that many third graders are given a weekly list of spelling words to learn, and after that week most of the children continued to misspell those words. Kids can learn to spell the words for the test, but don't even notice them or realize they are misspelling them in practical writing.

Helping a third grader improve spelling involves making the words relevant, and helping the child develop a familiarity with the words. Unfortunately, many teachers do not use the volumes and volumes of research available on the subject, and still attempt to teach spelling through the weekly spelling list and spelling test.

Moats (2000) has found that students become more familiar with words through multi-sensory activities. This means that kids learn to spell words by doing more than just writing them on a piece of paper. Word-sorting, sorting the words into groups based on similarities, is a good activity.

Writing the similar parts of the words in colored marker is a good activity for visual-spatial learners. For example, if the child sorts several words into a group that end in -ent, they can then write those letters in green, and the rest of the word in blue.

Setting the spelling of a word to music is another good memory trick for certain children. Playing games with words, doing word searches, and making puzzles out of spelling words are also effective.

In order to spell well, children need to be able to recognize words that don't look right, even if they cannot point out exactly what is wrong. Spelling is a very visual skill. Parents can provide third grade spelling help by finding many different ways for their child to spell the weekly words.

Writing the words in shaving cream, cutting them out of sand paper, stamping them with stamps and spelling them with magnet letters on the refrigerator are all good and fun ways to practice spelling. Writing the spelling words out in a list may not be much help, but writing them into a story or poem helps a lot.

Rather than having a parent or teacher correct the spelling, the child should go back and correct his or her own spelling. This gives the child a sense of responsibility and accomplishment, and also provides to opportunity to look for words that don't look right.

REFERENCES

DuBois, Erickson, K & Jacobs, M 2007, 'Improving Spelling of High Frequency Words for Transfer in Written Work,' Action Research Project Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the School of Education, Saint Xavier University, Chicago, IL.

Moats, LD 2000, 'Spelling,' International Dyslexia Association.