Read Write Inc. Spelling Programme

Our school curriculum is driven and shaped by our school vision, which informs everything that we do.

St Nicholas provides a welcoming, inclusive and aspirational learning environment at the heart of its community. We nurture, encourage and support all children, adults and their families to be the best as God intended. Following God’s example of love and trust, we develop resilience and creativity in all we do.

Learning, loving and encouraging through Christ.

An uncompromising focus on pupils’ personal development has made St Nicholas Church of England Primary Academy a place where pupils always come first. Ofsted 2019

St Nicholas CE Primary Academy uses the RWI Spelling Programme from Year 2 to 6 for the following reasons:

  • To enable to allow us meet the spelling expectations of the National Curriculum 2014
  • To raise standards in spelling
  • To provide consistency and progression in the teaching of spelling
  • To help support children to enable them to be more confident at spelling.

How Does This Programme Support Your Child in Learning to Spell?

RW Inc Spelling is an interactive programme which teaches spellings in a fun and engaging way. Each unit is introduced with a short video. It helps children to learn spellings with common patterns and uses rules in order to help them recall spellings as well as teaching exceptions to these rules.

Individual workbooks allow children to practise their spellings and the teaching naturally follows on from the Spell Review part of the RWInc phonics programme taught as soon as the children enter Reception at St Nicholas.  Therefore the children are already proficient at using dots (for individual sounds) and dashes (for digraphs) and prefixes and suffixes can be added to root words to help them to spell with greater accuracy, understanding and confidence.

Handy Tips for Supporting Your Child with Spelling

  • Practise tricky spellings regularly.
  • Revisit spellings from previous weeks.
  • Ask your child to explain the rule for the week and get them to give you example words so that you can build up a word bank that can be referred to frequently.
  • When your child is writing in their learning log remind them to use their dots and dashes and ‘fred fingers’ to spell.
  • Encourage your child to edit their own writing for misspelt words using the sounds chart in the log books to choose the right grapheme.
  • Make a note of the high frequency words which you notice your child is spelling wrong (remember that these are quite often RED WORDS and that you ‘Can’t fred a red!’)
  • Play homophone games where you give them a word like right/write and they write you both spellings and show you on the sounds chart which graphemes they would choose to spell them right! Make sure they know which one is which!
  • Play hold a sentence dictation where you give the child a short sentence with one of their spellings in which will help them to understand the meaning of the word and spell and punctuate correctly.

Mrs Longman recently ran a spelling workshop for parents and carers in which she demonstrated how to use some of the handy tips given above to support spelling at home and explained how the workbook and log books are used. To access a copy of the presentation please see below. 

Building Independence

Giving children weekly spellings to be tested (even when they do score 10/10!) does not mean that they will apply these in their own written work. With this new approach to the teaching of spellings we hope to support and encourage your child to become both more confident and independent spellers which will help them become better writers.  Revisiting spelling patterns and rules regularly is key to them becoming successful spellers.

Remember that the Spelling Programme is there to help them to become better at spelling with positive praise and encouragement and that, like everything, this will take practice.

Supporting Your Child’s Spelling at Home

To help you to support your children at home with their spellings on a weekly basis, the children will be given 6-8 spellings from the unit they are currently on which will follow a set pattern (these are explained at the bottom of each page in their Spelling Log Books). They will be tested on these the following week. In addition to these your child will also be given 6 red or orange words to learn from the National Curriculum word lists which are words the children are expected to know for their age range.