I have never read anything about using Whole Brain Teaching to help students learn their spelling words. How do you help your classes with Spelling? Anything that would help students to recall the correct spelling of words would be helpful to my teaching. Any "games" that can help more students to increase the amount of words that are spelled correctly will help also.

One of the best things I use in my classroom has been spellingcity.com. The students can take tests on-line at school and at home. Spellingcity also offers games they can play on-line with their spelling words. It is wonderful. It is also FREE! You must register and then you can create your word lists and save them for next year if you use the same lists! ( I don't usually use the same list as I pull my 3 different spelling tests from the different chapter books my first graders are reading.) It is always different each year according to ability and how fast they grow!

I hope you enjoy! I also have partners 1's and 2's teach each other with dry-erase boards. They love this hands on activity. We also play SWAT with our spelling words. This is where you post the words somewhere and have two teams. One person from each team go up at the same time and I will same I am looking for the word "whatever"! The first one to swat it with a flyswat scores a point for their team! Needless to say, they love it and no pencil/paper required!!!!

Let me know how you like!

Amy Herndon

I have started using an online website called spellingcity.com. It has games that I project onto my screen. Students write the words on white boards for practice.

Wow, spellingcity.com is a fantastic site! Thanks for sharing!

Busybeec, if you want to address spelling using power teaching try sign language. The alphabet is easily obtained off the internet and my students love using sign language as their gestures for spelling. I even give extra credit to students who can come to me at the end of the week and spell 3 words in sign language without help. Happy students....happy teacher!

Ross, that is a great idea! We already use sign language for the rules and the kids love it. So I am sure that they will love the challenge of using sign language in spelling.
After I wrote the original post, I had to teach three of the spellings for the /ur/ sound, ir, ur, and or. I could not think of any way to know which spelling to use except to memorize it. So I made up silly sentences with gestures, and the kids helped to make some of the gestures better, for each group of words. For example: The worm of the world loves to do word work in school, to help the kids remember that worm, world, work, word all used or to spell the /ur/ sound. I think this goes along with Power Teaching, but I was not sure.
Thanks to all that recommended the spelling website. I loved using a site like that a couple of years ago, but then the site decided to charge money, so I had to stop. It was great to learn of a new site that I could encourage the kids to use!

Thank you for sharing this site. I'm so excited about it. My students got on right away and loved it. I like the idea of having them write the words, too. Thanks so much.
Dana

Just want to share what has been going on in my Spelling class.
Two weeks ago I had to teach the sound /er/ spelled ir, ur, or. I thought about how we know which spelling to use and all I could come up with is memory for the visual of the word. So to help my students recall which spelling to use, I made up sentences with gestures using all the words that they had to know for the week. For the ir spelling, we used the sentence Once there was a circus (juggling hands) where a girl (pointing to a girl in class)was the first (pointer finger up)to circle (making a circle) a giant bird (flapping arms). The students then learned to spell circus, girl, first, circle and bird using ir. For the ur spelling we used the sentence The hurt, purple turtle (finger outspread downward) walked slowly, turned (turn head to side), opened his eyes wide to see a nurse (palms together in front and open in vertical motion). The students then learned to spell hurt, purple, turtle, turn, nurse. For the or spelling, the sentence was The worm (palms together wiggling up from stomach to head) of the world (make large circle beginning with thumbs together over the head and coming back together in front of legs) loves to do word work (one hands holds a pretend pad of paper and the other hand shows a writing motion) in school. The students then learned to spell worm, world, word, work. The results were amazing! I gave two bonus words that the students studied at home, but we did not touch on at school. Most of the students got 15 words spelled correctly! Previous to this lesson many had only 7-8 words spelled correctly.
We used it the next week with the sound /or/ spelled or, ore, oor, our. Again the results were similar with most of the students spelling all of the words correctly. Additionally, I challenged them to learn 3 or more words using finger spelling. Right before we left on the first day of the challenge one of the students had already learned a word, which she showed the class. They piggybacked off her and began sharing other letters that they knew and could use to change her word into another word. During the week, we are using Amy's idea with dry-erase boards so that we can help our partners to learn the words.
What fun we are all having learning our spelling! Thanks for all of your suggestions!