Year 2
Spelling Information
Part 1 (September – March)
Children in Year 2 continue to receive 20 minutes discrete
phonics/spelling teaching every day.
Children will continue to sound out and spell phonemes, applying their
phonic skills and knowledge to recognise and spell an increasing
number of complex words, identifying phonic irregularities and
becoming more secure with less common grapheme – phoneme
correspondences. (Phase 6 of Letters and Sounds)
As in Year 1, children’s spelling of the Phased high frequency words is
assessed half termly starting in September. They are given about 15
spellings to practise from the Phases they are working at. This may
be more than one phase. Children will have a spelling folder which
contains a copy of their present HFW spellings as well as a Spelling
Games booklet which contains a list of possible activities to use when
learning these spellings. In school children will practise these
spellings for Morning Work and during Literacy Skills sessions.
All children are introduced to a range of multi-sensory methods to
learn spellings and learn the Look-Say-Cover-Write-Check method.
Above are the objectives that we follow for teaching spelling.
Objective 1: To secure the reading and spelling of words containing different spellings for
phonemes (e.g. /igh/, igh, ie, y, i-e – I, night, tie, my) In the first half of the autumn term the
children learn that there can be many different ways of spelling the same phoneme such as ai, ay, a-e,
a, eigh, aigh, ei, ey all representing the ai phoneme.
Objective 2: To understand and begin to learn the conventions for adding the suffix -ing for
present tense and -ed for past tense (e.g. play – playing, played)
In the second half of the Autumn term, children are taught about the rules for adding the suffixes –
ed and –ing to verbs. This is quite tricky at first but they soon pick up the rules. For changing a verb
into the past tense there are five different rules:
For a word ending in ‘e’ we drop the ‘e’ and add ‘ed.
The ‘e’ is dropped because it helps when adding –ing
where we drop the ‘e’ and add ‘ing’.
In words such as hop, skip, rub, peg, bat where
there is a short vowel sound before a single final
consonant children are taught that they double the
final consonant. i.e. hopped, pegged, rubbed etc.
Some words just have ‘ed’ added and most words
ending in ‘y’ change the ‘y’ to an ‘i’ then add ‘ed’.
Finally, children are taught about irregular verbs
that don’t follow the rules. E.g buy-bought; see-saw;
run-ran.
To practise what they know, children play Past
Tense Penguin on www.phonicsplay.co.uk
Once children have learned the conventions for adding the suffix –ed, they find adding the suffix –ing
really easy as there are fewer rules.
To practise adding this suffix, we play Tumbling
Tumbleweed on www.phonicsplay.co.uk
Ideas for homework:
 Ask your child to sort the words into the two grids above.
Objective 3: To split compound words into their component parts and to use this knowledge to
support spelling (e.g. milkman, pancake)
In the first half of the spring term, children are taught that words in the English language can be
classified into three broad categories:
 simple words – words that cannot be reduced any further without destroying their meaning (e.g.
girl, play, do);
 complex words – words that have had suffixes or prefixes added to them, which has changed the
meaning (e.g. girls, played, undo);
compound words – words that consist of two simple words joined together (e.g. girlfriend,
playground).
Children are taught the following routine for spelling compound words: clap and count the
beats(syllables), draw the boxes, write the letters, say the word
sea
side
break
fast
We play games where children have to match two simple words in order to form a compound word. We
also spend time looking for examples of compound words in books.
Here are some words that you may like to copy onto individual cards and then get your child to match
into pairs:
Other suggestions for homework:
• Compound word hunt activity: children search a page of text to find compound words.
• Create lists of compound words for one base word (e.g. man, time, side, green, day, eye).
• Look at a page of TV listings and ask your child to identify as many programme words as they can
that are compound words.
I hope you’ll find this useful. Your children learn so much in school
and it is really hard to summarise!
Please see me or Miss Curry if you have any questions and look out for
Part 2 of the Spelling Information Guide which will fill you in on what
your child will be learning in the second half of the Spring term and
during the Summer term.
Natalie Rowe