Parents of primary school students often ask for a focus on spelling and writing. Typically, they request that we do a spelling test during the lesson because their child’s teacher has highlighted spelling and vocabulary as an area of concern. While I do implement spelling tests in my sessions frequently, I’ve found that the main issue with most of these students is that they are unfamiliar with the words that they are being tested on. Once they have actually encountered a particular word while reading, they can often recall the correct spelling however, because of a lack of recreational reading, their word banks are limited.

Naturally most of these students also struggle with writing since they don’t have the words to appropriately express their thoughts. This is most apparent in reading their creative writing samples.

I decided to try setting ‘novel study’ tasks with one of my younger students and since then it’s become a fixture for most of my English students. I’ll typically assign a chapter per week and 1-2 pages of worksheets that test their understanding of the text. We don’t always manage to finish the books we start but this style of long form text has given them a different set of skills than a reading comprehension sheet could. They are able to better understand how to track overall themes across the different chapters. On top of that, to an extent it’s important to build their endurances for tasks that take more time. I’ve seen many students struggle with the increased workload in high school and very often it’s not because the work is that much more difficult than what they are prepared for but instead it’s because the volume of homework they are given is far more than what they expect.

This won’t be an effective strategy for every student but I think it’s worth considering in most cases.

Nahian Khan