Day 80: Word search fun

Being kind by helping Callum with his spelling homework:

My seven-year old nephew Callum is having weekly spelling tests, and it’s not his strongest subject.

Each week he gets a list of around 14 words that will feature in the following week’s test and his mummy sits with him each day going through them.

I’m keen to help him too, especially as English was my favourite subject. If it was maths he was struggling with, I’d have no chance!

Callum comes to our house twice a week after school, and I’ve been spending some time going through the words with him. But like any other seven-year-old, he gets bored easily. Really easily.

So, I decided to try and make it fun.

Having trained in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, I truly believe that using a more active approach through games can motivate learners, and find it helps them learn and retain more.

And from my six years of experience, I have a lot of fun yet effective tricks up my sleeve –  I just need to find them!

As Callum loves the word searches I’ve been printing off for him recently, I’ve decided to make them more relevant to what he is being taught at school.

Each week using one of the thousands of fabulous online resources, I create a few different word searches using the words he needs to learn.

And he absolutely loves them. I find that his concentration span is two to three times longer than before.

His teacher also hands out a short definition for each word, which I type up in large font, print off and cut out. After I’ve mixed them up, it’s down to Callum to match each word with the correct definition. Again, it’s simple stuff, but I find the interaction makes it so much more effective.

Not only have these simple techniques made Callum’s spelling homework much more fun, I’m really enjoying polishing up my teaching skills again. And I‘m sure more ideas will come back to me as we continue on.

So with this in mind, my happy for today is being kind by helping Callum with his spelling homework.

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