Teach students how to read and write irregularly spelled high frequency words. Start with words that are frequently used in writing such as "because," "they" and "friend." Introduce one word at a time and place each word on the word wall after it has been introduced. Once a word is placed on the word wall, expect all students to spell it correctly.
Teach common rimes, or word families, such as -ack, -all, -ain, -ight, -ale, -ick, and -est. Demonstrate how to change the onset, or first sounds up to the vowel, on the rimes; for example change "pack" to "sack." Give students time to manipulate onsets and rimes. Use this activity to help students learn how to take apart words.
Teach students how to use the strategy of analogy to read and spell words. Start with a known word such as "play." Explain that if they know how to spell "play," then they can spell "today." Apply this to reading also. For example, "You can read the word pain. Use what you know about that word to help you read this word (strain)."
Expand the skill of how to take apart words. Show students how to take off suffixes and prefixes, or to look for chunks they know. For example, if the word is "lovely", cover "ly" and ask a student to read the base word "love". Many big words have smaller parts that are easy to read and write. Take the word "together" and ask, "Is there a part that can help you?". Cover letters so that only "to" is showing. This small part can help the student to figure out the word.
Introduce a long vowel word and have students generate words with the same vowel sound. Make a chart that has a column for each spelling pattern. Show students how to sort the words and place them under the correct spelling pattern on the chart. Repeat this lesson with other long vowel words.
Teacher's word: make.
Student responses: bake, cake, rain, pain, made, play, great, eight, weigh.
Labels for each column: a_e, ai, ay, ea, eigh.