Americans have been glorifying spelling for years now with competitive spelling bees. A few years ago, the BBC tried to make spelling sexy (or at least competitive) with the UK’s first national spelling competition. Over 100,000 children took part in Hard Spell. The competition mustn’t have been a ratings winner, as it was axed after the second year.
But the Hard Spell site is still present on the BBC’s sprawling online archive. There’s an interesting spelling game you can play to test your spelling. I’m not sure how the game is really set up. If it works off a database of thousands of hard to spell words, then this is a phenomenal game. If it’s just a sheeny shiny interface with the words hard coded into the app, then this game took a lot of development time for minimal return. Anyway. Go test yourself!
A quick google search has shown me that there are loads of software packages that aim to teach kids how to spell, from just 3 letters to multi-syllabic behemoths of words. There’s also what looks like a nice spelling app for the iPhone here – a spin-off from the successful The Times Spelling Bee website.
Seems to me that a decent piece of spelling software will be treated as a game by kids. Let them get in, test themselves, and give them rewards for improvement. I wouldn’t expect the children of Ireland and Britain to become amazing spellers. Some kids will have aptitude, others won’t. Some kids will have aptitude and just not care. Others will try.
Some skills can be quickly and easily taught to kids digitally at their own pace – spelling is one. This is the sort of learning schools could accommodate quite easily. Check out this post I did a while back on how I learned to type quickly and happily with a software programme. And how I was then bored silly for 5 years in school learning to batter an old manual typewriter in time to the teacher’s stick bouncing across an old paper chart sellotaped to the blackboard. When are we going to change the record?
