Build Students’ S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G Skills This Year

Road workers in North Carolina won’t be winning any spelling bees. Their misspelling of the word S-H-C-O-O-L (in 10-foot tall letters nonetheless) has them r-e-d with embarrassment. The workers learned a valuable lesson from their error: misspelling school is not sh-cool. (View a video news report)

A SH-COOL SPELLING TOOL

Seeing that news report out of North Carolina reminded me of a new online spelling tool that I ran across a month ago. Maybe you have been to the BigIQkids.com Web site. If you haven’t been there, take a quick look around. BigIQkids is a cool tool to pass along to your teachers. They can use the grade-level word lists that are provided, or they can create their own word lists for students to use. Students practice or test themselves and earn “coins” they can use to play a wide variety of fun online games. BigIQkids’ spelling program -- and its other programs -- are free of charge. The site also offers premium programs that enable teachers or parents to monitor and receive emails about students’ progress.

MORE SH-COOL SPELLING RESOURCES

For more great spelling resources see Education World’s special Spelling archive. There you will find dozens of spelling lesson and game ideas, including these:

Five Spelling Games
Spice up weekly spelling-list study with these five fun activities. (Grades K-8)

Earn Spelling Points
More than 20 activities for spicing up your weekly spelling lessons.

Those resources will help make your students A+ spellers. And what could be sh-cooler than that!