Top Tips for Helping Your Child with their Spelling & Grammar

SPAG (spelling, punctuation, and grammar) is a pretty big part of English as they are the basics that children need to construct well-written sentences. Practice will of course help your child improve, so you should look for ways to get them to write more often. Below is guidance from an independent school in Leatherhead on how you can help your child in this area.

Practice Spellings

Children are usually set spellings each week to remember as a part of their homework and these are tested on in class. Aside from these spellings you may choose to work on some of your own in a similar fashion to help your child build their vocabulary and learn their spellings. Instead, however, to make things a little easier so that they don’t have double the homework to complete, you might choose to use a tool like word of the day that randomly generates sophisticated new words they have not heard of before.

Journaling

If your child’s not already journaling or keeping a diary, it’s something to consider as it will get them writing on a more regular basis. It will help them improve their writing skills such as their SPAG, handwriting and conveying their thoughts through words. 

Blogging

Blogging is another outlet your child can explore. They can create a blog dedicated to their passions and interests, such as football or jewellery making for example and share helpful tips, advice, and their successes. As it’s something that they enjoy and have an avid interest in, they should have no problem getting into the swing of things and have fun writing.

Reading 

Aside from writing, you should look to increase the time your child spends reading. According to experts, children should spend a minimum of 15 to 20 minutes a day reading for the benefits it can have on their memory, comprehension, and literacy. What reading also does is introduce your child to new words and their spellings which can help improve their spelling, punctuation, and grammar. 

Let Them Be the Teacher

The great thing about being a parent in today’s world is that there’s a variety of materials and resources parents can use to support children in their learning. If you search, you will be able to find dozens of worksheets on SPAG which let children be the teacher and spot mistakes. While it won’t get them to practise their writing, it will teach them common mistakes to look out for and encourage them to be more thorough with their work.

Proofreading

That brings us nicely on to proofreading. Even the greatest of writers need to proofread their work to ensure that everything makes sense, flows smoothly and is written in a clear and coherent way. Taking a few minutes to proofread at the end of any writing task can make all of the difference and help your child to score top marks on their SPAG. This may be better to do after a few moments when they can come back to their work a fresh and clearly spot their mistakes.

Writing Tools

While it might seem like cheating, having auto-correct and tools such as Grammarly may be worth looking into to not only improve the quality of their work, but teach them ways that they can improve their writing.

These are just a few ways that you can help your child improve on their SPAG. As you would imagine, it isn’t the most exciting of topics, it is very important as writing is needed throughout all subjects at school. To make it fun and something that they get the hang of quite quickly, be sure to pick activities that they will enjoy.