Harry is an excellent student at school.  He tries hard and aims to please his teacher.  But no matter how hard we try we seem to struggle with spellings.  Each week he gets his words and each Friday he gets at least half of them wrong!  He makes errors based mainly on the fact he spells just like me- badly!  He spells phonetically so because can be written bcos.  I can see where he is coming from but cracking this nut is going to take some thinking outside the box. 

What we have tried so far includes:

• Basic test followed by copying out the wrong ones 5 times (that's how I remember it working when I was at school, or more correctly not working, I still can't spell!)
• Sticking every word he needs to spell for the year on his wall so when he writes his stories and cartoons he can see how the word is spelt correctly
• Talking through each word letter by letter

Having spoken to Harry's teacher this year she has suggested singing or even rapping the letters of the words.  I can only assume she has no idea how ludicrous this idea is based on my singing voice!  My children cringe when I sing, the dog even looks at me funny!  So I am trying a no test method and simply using the words in different ways each night in the hope that by Friday's test at school they have soaked into his brain. 

These are my latest spelling tactics: