✏️ Spelling at Cottesbrooke

At Cottesbrooke Infant & Nursery School, spelling is taught in a structured and supportive way, starting in the Early Years and building as children move through the school.

We want all children to feel confident and successful as spellers, developing the skills and strategies they need to become independent writers.

📚 How We Teach Spelling

In Reception (and Nursery), spelling begins with the teaching of phonics through the Read Write Inc. (RWI) programme. As children progress, their phonic knowledge continues to develop alongside the teaching of spelling patterns, rules and exceptions.

Children are also expected to learn and confidently spell a number of key words by the end of Reception, Year 1 and Year 2.

If you’ve attended one of our phonics or spelling workshops, you may already be familiar with some of the strategies we use.

🧠 Spelling Strategies by Year Group

As children move through school, they build up a toolkit of strategies to help them spell. These strategies are introduced gradually so that children become fluent and confident with each one.

✨ Reception

Children in Reception are introduced to the following strategies:

• Fred Fingers – segmenting sounds to spell phonetically

• Red Rhythms – learning tricky “red” words with rhythm and repetition

• Word Banks – building topic-specific or patterned word sets

• RWI Sound Mats – using visual prompts for sounds and spellings

📝 Year 1

In Year 1, children continue to use all of the strategies from Reception, and are also introduced to:

• Syllables – breaking words into syllables to support spelling longer words

📖 Year 2

In Year 2, children build on all of the above and learn three additional strategies:

• Dictionaries – using dictionaries to check and explore spellings

• Trying Lion – having a go before asking for help or checking

• Mnemonics – learning memorable phrases to help spell tricky words (e.g. “because = big elephants can always understand small elephants”)

📌 You can find more information about each strategy on the posters below.

If you have any questions about spelling or would like support with helping your child at home, please speak to their class teacher.

Additional Spelling Videos

I have included some videos below that are about particular spelling rules/ patterns. Please take a look to see how you can further support your child at home.