Mavis Kerrigan.
So what is your Spelling strategy?

Mavis began by telling us about her book, which is close to being finished. She asked the group for some help with final tasks to do with getting it into print and certainly had two offers during the evening. (Its easy to think we have to do everything ourselves, when in fact there are often people who can help, with consummate ease and skill to do things I struggle with, .)
The book covers many ‘Spelling Strategies’ and how to find the ‘right’ one for everyone.
To frame the evening for the group Mavis asked us what we wanted to get from the evening to make it a worthwhile session.
There were many around learning something ..
“I don’t already know”, “to help my children”, “to help colleagues”, “to help dyslexics”. Others about strategies ... “a model or strategy I can refer to”, “understanding my own strategy”, “interested in other people’s strategies”, “finding alternative strategies to my own”. And some personal learnings .... “become more instinctive with spelling exceptions”, “to know why I sometimes make mistakes”!

Enough of the serious stuff!! Time for a game, or rather a spelling test. (I always rather enjoyed these in class two, age 8, when the whole class was lined up in front of the teacher’s desk, which was on a platform, and the best speller from last time was at the end of the line with the rest of us arranged in order of stupidity down to the one who had most trouble spelling anything. Possibly not politically correct today. The teacher would fire a word at the head of the line and if it was spelt incorrectly would point with her stick at the next poor unfortunate, when someone got the word right they would move up the line past all those who got it wrong. The next word would start from the next child after the swot who got it right!)

This is where we now experiment with embedded audio so I can ask you how to spell a particular word. This is a word that not many (actually none) of us knew or even had a clue what it meant. Mavis was using this to discover our strategies for spelling words we haven’t come across before. To hear this word click on the arrow in the bar below.

If this works for you, use the play button to hear it as often as you like before writing down how you think this word is spelt. No cheating!  If that one was too easy for you try this one.  Again press on the play arrow in the box below.

To give you a clue. Word one is an instrument for measuring blood pressure, word two means ’setting little value on’. If you haven’t got sound on your computer you may be going quietly mad by now and before you pull out all your hair those two words appear here.

We all had a go at this and then Mavis recorded our efforts on a flip chart. Then using a good speller to demonstrate she asked Jenny (she’s the one with her hand up in the picture above) to go through her strategy for spelling a word she hasn’t met before. There’s a lot to be learnt from watching someone go through their strategy. A real opportunity for flexing our sensory acuity. Jenny is always a good subject ‘cos she doesn’t hide what’s happening. (Bet you wish you’d been there now!)
After this we spilt into pairs to play with words. Using short words and long words to test our partner’s spelling strategy and to notice what we noticed as our pair worked through their own strategy. (Following on nicely from the work we did with Mike Gray the previous month, which followed on nicely from the work we’d done with Ed Beckmann the month before). It takes nothing short of genius to arrange these things you know. You really must manage your diary around the 1st Thursday of the month and make sure you get the most from your own NLP skills.
We gathered back together for a ‘wash up’ and sharing of what we had noticed.

The Bre........ak!!?

We took the break and had a drink with only a short time to network before we were summoned back by the ‘musical anchor’.
The second part of the evening became a wide ranging discussion amongst all of us on spelling and the strategies we might use for adults, children, and everything in between. We had some fun playing with stop, which is actually pronounced sdop. Though Bernie couldn’t hear it. (May be the ringing in her ears!).
And so the evening ended all too soon.
For some useful info on spelling strategies and some Maths resources visit www.schoolteachingresources.com
Mavis’s book is likely to be called “Minding your spelling with NLP.”
To contact Mavis for more information or to offer help with the publishing of her book mavis@ssgl.fsnet.co.uk
Thank you Mavis for a stimulating evening, and when you went back to the first chart of the evening to check out if people had ‘got’ what they wanted, you had ticks all the way down!”
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