Six high-impact routines to supercharge your students’ spelling
Spelling deserves more than a word list on Monday and a test on Friday. These six routines give students brief, explicit instruction and daily practice analyzing patterns, spelling with them, and applying them in their own writing.
CoreGrades K–2InterventionGrades K–3
The six routines at a glance
All six3–5× per week15–20 min
Teach it
Pick your routines, select your words, teach it Monday.
You choose which of the six routines you are teaching today. You get a screen that walks you through each routine in order, with suggested scripting and a timer.
1Pick your routines
2Put in your words
3Teach from the screen
Word Workout3 of 6
Step 2 · Dictate each word
shipped
Teacher
Listen: shipped. I shipped a package to my grandma. What word? Tap the sounds.
4:12~18 min total
Why these six
The evidence behind the routines
Spelling is a decision-making task, and it gets less instructional time than it warrants. These six are the practices with the strongest evidence, distilled into steps you can teach tomorrow.
Brennan Chandler, PhDLiteracy researcher
Where does this fit?
Embedded in core, standalone in intervention
There are many good ELA programs and reading interventions, and spelling is sometimes underemphasized in them. When you see a gap in your students’ spelling, these routines are short and portable enough to add without restructuring your block.
Which program?
Teach these
Skip
Block shapes above are illustrative, not any one program. Adjust the minutes to your schedule.
Take it with you
Start here · 3-minute read
Why these six routines
What the evidence says about spelling, why it is worth teaching directly, and where these six routines come from.
Does spelling still matter?
The science of reading has brought renewed attention to phonemic awareness and phonics, and rightly so (Castles et al., 2018). Spelling deserves the same attention. It is sometimes treated as outdated or unnecessary because students can rely on autocorrect, spell-check, or generative AI. But these tools cannot replace the learning that happens through spelling.
Spelling requires students to connect a word’s sounds, letters, patterns, and meaningful parts (Moats, 2005; Perfetti, 1992). These connections support both reading and writing. As spelling becomes more automatic, students can devote less working memory to getting words onto the page and more to developing ideas, constructing sentences, and organizing a text (Graham & Santangelo, 2014). This is especially important for students with or at risk for learning disabilities, who may already find transcription effortful (Berninger et al., 2002).
Spelling instruction also strengthens word reading by helping students build accurate, lasting representations of written words (Ehri, 1997). Additionally, spelling errors give teachers useful information (Williams & Novelli, 2025). They show what students understand about sounds, spelling patterns, and word parts, as well as what they need to learn next (Treiman & Bourassa, 2000).
Spelling is not a list of words to memorize for Friday. It is a foundational literacy skill that should be explicitly taught, practiced, and applied in real writing.
Why is spelling so tricky?
Reading and spelling are not mirrored cognitive processes. To read a word, you need only partial knowledge. To spell it, you need precise knowledge of every letter, in order, and the sound alone will not get you there.
Take the sound /ē/. It has many legal spellings:
/ē/ · which spelling?
eeeaieye
weeeaieyek
The same sound is spelled ea in weak, ie in field, y in happy, and e in me.
A student who wants to write week has to do more than hear the vowel. They have to know which spelling of /ē/ to use, and lean on meaning to separate week from weak. That is a decision, made letter by letter, and decisions take instruction and lots of practice with teacher feedback.
Who are these routines for?
Spell Squad is built for core spelling instruction in Grades K–2 and for intervention through Grade 3. Third graders who still need code-based spelling work benefit from the same routines.
We field tested every routine in Grades 1 through 3, in both core classrooms and intervention groups. Kids loved them, teachers found them easy to teach, and each one adapts to what your students need.
Use the Spell Squad routines as their own sequence in your ELA block, or fold them into an intervention. You do not have to teach all six. Pick one, teach it for two weeks, then add another.
Why routines, and where do these come from?
Anyone who has been to an Orangetheory or a Barry’s class knows what to expect before the music starts. The work is hard, but the format is not.
Less load on you. No planning from scratch. The structure holds, so your attention goes to the words and the teaching moves.
Less load on them. Students know what comes next, so working memory goes to the practice, not to working out the activity format.
More reps on what works. A fixed routine means more practice on the active ingredients of good instruction.
The six routines themselves are drawn from the highest-effect studies in our meta-analysis of spelling intervention (Chandler et al., 2025), and grounded in the science of reading, writing, and learning.
Each one names what it is, why it works, and what it looks like in a classroom, with the teacher language written out.
The big idea
These are the active ingredients of effective spelling instruction in the primary grades.
The practices with the strongest evidence, distilled into steps you can teach tomorrow.
Brennan Chandler, PhDLiteracy researcher
References
Chandler, B. W., Toste, J. R., Novelli, C., Rodgers, D. B., & Hardeman, E. (2025). A meta-analytic review of spelling interventions for students with or at-risk for learning disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, advance online publication.
Chandler, B. W., Toste, J. R., & Novelli, C. (2025). The science of spelling: Untangling what evidence supports and questions that remain. The Reading League Journal, 6(3), 41–56.
Colenbrander, D., Wang, H. C., Arrow, T., & Castles, A. (2020). Teaching irregular words: What we know, what we don’t know, and where we can go from here. The Educational and Developmental Psychologist, 37(2), 97–104.
Fuchs, D., Fuchs, L. S., Mathes, P. G., & Simmons, D. C. (1997). Peer-assisted learning strategies: Making classrooms more responsive to diversity. American Educational Research Journal, 34(1), 174–206.
Lithgow, A., Kohnen, S., Barr, P., Robidoux, S., & Colenbrander, D. (2026). Teaching irregular words: A comparison of mispronunciation correction and heart-word methods. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1–25.
Dixon, R. (1993). Surefire Way to Better Spelling.
Also cited above: Berninger et al. (2002); Castles et al. (2018); Ehri (1997); Graham & Santangelo (2014); Kearns (2020); Moats (2005); Perfetti (1992); Treiman & Bourassa (2000); Williams & Novelli (2025); Zeno et al. (1995). Full references to follow.
4 OF 6 · WORD LEVEL
Word Heroes
~3 minIrregular words
What Is It?
Explicit instruction in high-frequency irregular words, with attention to the irregular parts.
Why Use It?
Irregular words contain one or more unexpected sound–spelling correspondences. Explicit instruction supports fluent reading and writing of common words.
What Does It Look Like?
The teacher chooses one of two evidence-aligned routines per word, then introduces, maps, and has students spell it. Each routine takes approximately 3 minutes.
Terminology
Term
Meaning
Example
Sight word
Any word a reader can recognize instantly
transportation
High-frequency word
A word that appears frequently in print
that
Irregular word
A word in which one or more letters do not represent the most common sound
yacht
English words fall along a continuum from highly predictable to less predictable (Colenbrander et al., 2020). High-frequency words that follow less predictable sound-spelling patterns (e.g., said, does, was) can be referred to as word heroes or heart words. The name fits. Many of these are function words, the small connectors like was, of, the, and does that hold sentences together and carry the grammar of English. They rarely stand out, but a sentence falls apart without them, and students encounter them in nearly every line they read and write. That combination, high frequency plus irregular spelling, is exactly what makes them worth teaching and practicing explicitly.
Word Heroes
doeswasthedohisifthatforwith
Less predictableMore predictable
Before the lesson~2 min
Choose 1 or 2 words.
Decide which routine each word gets.
Before you begin
Choosing an Irregular-Word Routine
Both mispronunciation correction (MPC) and the “heart-word” method can support learning irregular words. In Lithgow et al. (2026), both methods produced significantly stronger reading and spelling outcomes than look-and-say reading practice. The researchers found no significant difference between the two methods in final reading or spelling performance, although students achieved comparable gains more quickly during MPC instruction. These findings support offering both routines as research-aligned options over whole word memorization. Teachers should select one routine for a word based primarily on whether the word’s sound-out pronunciation provides a useful bridge to its correct pronunciation and spelling.
Teaching a word this week?
Pick it and the scripts below fill in with that word, ready to teach.
During the lesson~3 min
Use Mispronunciation Correction When…
Choose Sound It, Fix It, Spell It when sounding out the word produces a useful bridge to a word students already know orally. The sound-out form should help students recognize the word, notice its letters, and remember its spelling.
touch: towch → touch
listen: lis-ten → listen
was: wass → was
Sentence context helps students connect the sound-out form to the correct spoken word.
Routine steps
Use the Heart-Word Method When…
Choose the heart-word method when the sound-out form is too distant, confusing, or likely to produce another familiar word. Students pronounce and segment the word correctly, connect the expected sounds to their spellings, and directly learn the unexpected correspondence.
Possible examples include one, of, does, who, and once.
Routine steps
Quick Tips
Teach words by frequency and similar type or pattern when possible.
Scaffold up or down by removing or adding steps as needed.
Review previously taught heart words during Word Workout and Spell Streak.
Colenbrander, D., Wang, H. C., Arrow, T., & Castles, A. (2020). The Educational and Developmental Psychologist, 37(2), 97–104. · Lithgow, A., Kohnen, S., Barr, P., Robidoux, S., & Colenbrander, D. (2026). Scientific Studies of Reading, 1–25.
3 OF 6 · WORD LEVEL
Word Workout
~5 minGuided practice
What Is It?
Cumulative guided encoding in which students stretch out the sounds in words and write the matching letters.
Why Use It?
Spelling practice is cognitively demanding and strengthens orthographic memory. Cumulative encoding practice supports both spelling and reading.
What Does It Look Like?
The teacher prompts students to “stretch and spell” approximately 10 words. The routine takes about 5 minutes.
Before the lesson~2 min
Create your list of 10 words.
4 to 5 with today’s pattern, 5 to 6 review.
Type today’s words
The runner will walk you through these one at a time, and every script will say the real word. Separate them with commas, spaces, or new lines. This stays on your device for this session only.
No list yet. The runner will count 10 reps with an example word.
Sound boxes in three counts, or handwriting lines.
Coming soon
Word lists
Pick a pattern and get 10 cumulative words built for you. For now, bring your own.
During the lesson~5 min
Fade the support
Start where your students are. As their responses become more accurate over time, drop a level of scaffolding. The scripts below use your first word and rewrite themselves to match.
Routine steps
Class favorite · try it Friday
Partner Reps
Same Word Workout, just in pairs. Like grabbing a partner at the gym, one student calls the reps while the other does them, then they switch. Everybody is working the whole time.
Pairing, what a coach says when a partner misses, and the four steps.
Need a center idea?
Students can keep practicing without you.
The Project Read AI spelling tutor gives students immediate feedback as they spell, which is useful when someone needs more reps than the block allows.
The same stretch-and-spell you teach in Word Workout, done in pairs. One student calls the word, the other writes it, then they trade.
Why Use It?
Every student is working the whole time instead of waiting for a turn. Pairing raises the number of practice opportunities each child gets, and peer tutoring has been tested in spelling itself, not only in reading.
What Does It Look Like?
Partners work through about ten words from a list you prepared, trading roles halfway. Give it about ten minutes, since every student now spells and coaches rather than waiting a turn.
Before you start
Rank your class, then fold the list in half.
List every student from the strongest speller down to the one who needs the most support. Fold the list in half. The first name pairs with the first name below the fold, and so on down.
Top halfBottom half
1Strongest speller↔6
2↔7
3↔8
4↔9
5↔10Needs the most support
Ten students shown. The fold does the sorting for you: it never puts two struggling spellers together, and it never pairs your two strongest with each other.
With an odd number, make one trio.
Two coaches and one speller. All three rotate, so nobody sits out and nobody coaches twice in a row.
Pull ten words from skills you have already taught.
Long a, long e, the -ck pattern, whatever you have been working on. This is practice, not first teaching. A coach can point at a word that does not match the list, but a coach cannot teach a pattern the pair has never met.
Teach students to coach
Coaching is a skill. Teach it the way you teach a routine: model it, do it together, then let one pair try in front of everyone. Put the Coaching Tips chart up first and teach the three words the whole class will use: call it, check it, correct it.
Model it.
You are the coach, a student is the speller. Practice dictating three words, and have the speller miss one on purpose to see the error routine.
Do it together.
Now you are the speller and one student coaches you while the class watches. Misspell one and let them catch it.
Let one pair try.
A pair works at the front while everyone else watches for the three coach moves.
During the lesson~10 min
Role 1CoachReads the word aloud, checks the spelling against your list, and points at the tricky part if it is wrong.
swap after 4 to 5 words
Role 2SpellerWrites the word, fixes it right away if the coach flags something, and earns a point for every correct spelling.
Routine steps
Pairing students increases the number of active practice opportunities each child gets, boosts time on task, and tends to lift outcomes across the whole class. Peer tutoring has been studied in spelling specifically, not only in reading: with first graders with learning disabilities (Taylor & Alber, 2003), with third and fourth graders (Maheady & Harper, 1987), and more recently across the elementary grades (Lundberg et al., 2023). The structure of the routine, and the Correction Card and Coaching Tips chart that go with it, are adapted from Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (Fuchs et al., 1997). The coaching role builds social skills too: turn-taking, specific and kind feedback, and cheering on a partner.
References
Fuchs, D., Fuchs, L. S., Mathes, P. G., & Simmons, D. C. (1997). Peer-assisted learning strategies: Making classrooms more responsive to diversity. American Educational Research Journal, 34(1), 174–206.
Lundberg, A., Petersen-Brown, S., Houlihan, D. D., Panahon, C., & Wagner, D. (2023). Applying peer tutoring to spelling with elementary-aged students. Journal of Applied School Psychology, 39(2), 107–129.
Maheady, L., & Harper, G. F. (1987). A class-wide peer tutoring program to improve the spelling test performance of low-income, third- and fourth-grade students. Education and Treatment of Children, 120–133.
Taylor, L. K., & Alber, S. R. (2003). The effects of classwide peer tutoring on the spelling achievement of first graders with learning disabilities. The Behavior Analyst Today, 4(2), 183.
1 OF 6 · SUBWORD LEVEL
Sound Check
~1 minWarm-upOptional
What Is It?
A quick warm-up in which students practice hearing, saying, and segmenting the sounds in a word, with the letters written in front of them.
Why Use It?
Strong phoneme segmentation predicts spelling success and supports efficient word reading. Pairing it with letters, rather than doing it orally alone, is what connects the sounds to spelling.
What Does It Look Like?
For about a minute at the start of the lesson, you write a word on the board and students segment it while you point under each letter. Keep it to a minute. It is a warm-up, not a main event.
Read this first
This routine is optional.
Sound Check can be a helpful on-ramp for the students who need one. The letters stay in front of students throughout, because segmenting without them does not carry over to spelling as well.
Skip it
Your core or supplemental program already embeds it.
Your block already covers segmenting with letters somewhere else. Oral-only phonemic awareness is not the same thing.
You are teaching whole group and your students are accurate.
You are short on time. This is the first routine to cut.
Keep it
Your students still need a bit more phoneme segmentation support.
You are teaching a Tier 2 group.
You have reluctant spellers who need to warm up before they write.
Before the lesson
Pick a level and about 4 words you can write quickly.
Words from your own scope and sequence work best. Start at the level your students are accurate with and move up.
During the lesson~1 min
Set the difficulty
What makes a word harder to segment is where the tricky consonants sit, not how many sounds it has. Every script below rewrites itself to match.
Who are you with
Words
You model once. Everything after that is guided. The first word carries through the model and into guided practice, then two new words follow, and the last one goes to a single student.
What it sounds like
The prompts above name the word and leave you a slot per sound. Here is the same routine with the sounds said out loud, using sun. Point under each letter as you go.
Model
Lead
Routine steps
Adaptations
Tap it: students tap a finger, a counter, or the desk for each sound.
Count it: after segmenting, ask how many sounds they heard.
Build up: start with three-sound words and add a digraph, a blend, or an ending once they are accurate.
Printables
Print what is useful, change what is not, and adapt them for your students.
For teachers
For students
Partner Reps
Version
Set up your routines
Today’s routines
Put in what you are teaching, then teach them one after another without leaving the screen. Nothing is saved, so set this up shortly before you teach, or print this page and keep the paper.
Students quickly spell five words on whiteboards or paper. The correct spellings are revealed at the end, and students count how many they spelled correctly in a row.
★
Where do the five words come from?
From the errors you noticed earlier in the week. Spell Streak is where you come back to them. Take a mental note during the other routines, and let that note choose your list.
Before the lesson
Choose five challenge words.
A mix: words with the current target, review words from previously taught patterns, rules, morphemes, or irregular spellings, and any word that has been consistently sticky.
Type today’s five
Separate them with commas, spaces, or new lines. The samples below are words used elsewhere on this site, to show where a list like this comes from. This stays on your device for this session only.
During the lesson~1 min
Routine steps
The streak
How many in a row?
Students count how many they spelled correctly in a row. A miss ends the streak. Five out of five is a streak of five; four right with the fourth one missed is a streak of three.
2 OF 6 · SUBWORD LEVEL
Pattern Power-Up
~3 minDirect instruction
What Is It?
Direct, explicit teaching of a target spelling pattern, rule, or morpheme, with handwriting practice.
Why Use It?
Explicit instruction in phoneme–grapheme correspondences and high-utility spelling rules supports stronger spelling outcomes. Handwriting helps anchor the pattern in memory.
What Does It Look Like?
The teacher models the target, and students practice writing it and saying the associated sound as they write. The routine takes approximately 3 minutes.
Before the lessonChoosing your target
Scope and sequence
Should spelling follow the phonics scope and sequence?
Use it as your starting point. You do not have to follow it lockstep.
Students often need more spelling practice with a pattern after your phonics has moved on. Reading a pattern accurately does not mean a student can spell it.
/ē/ · which spelling?
eeeaee_eyei
seeeaee_eyeik
Reading seek means going from letters to sounds. Spelling it means going from sounds to letters, and choosing between several legal spellings of /ē/. Reading never asks for that choice.
Dixon, R. (1993). Surefire Way to Better Spelling.
Where is your target coming from?
Three places a target usually comes from. Pick the one that matches your week.
Choose one target and pull your examples.
Two or three examples, and one or two non-examples if the target generalizes. One target per lesson.
During the lesson~3 min
See how the scripts change
A target takes one of two shapes, and the model changes with it. These are examples. Put your own target in and the same shape holds.
Routine steps
Make it stick
A Cumulative Tracking System
Give students one place to record every pattern, rule, and morpheme they have learned. A Pattern Power Bank, a section of a notebook, anything they keep.
It does thisSupports retrievalStudents have somewhere to look back to, which turns every past target into review rather than something taught once and dropped.
and
And thisMakes learning visibleThe list grows all year. Students can see how much they know, which is hard to feel when each lesson is three minutes long.
Add the target to the bank during step 2, while students are already writing it. It costs a few seconds there and nothing later.
One line per pattern, with room for examples.
5 OF 6 · TEXT LEVEL
Sentence Sprint
~5 minDictation
What Is It?
Students spell a short, encodable sentence from dictation using previously taught target patterns.
Why Use It?
Dictation connects spelling to authentic writing. Applying patterns in context supports fluency and transfer.
What Does It Look Like?
The teacher dictates a sentence. Students write, check, and correct it with feedback. The routine takes approximately 5 minutes.
Writing development is not strictly linear. Students build knowledge across these levels at the same time, with explicit instruction in foundational skills and opportunities to apply those skills in sentences and connected text.
Where dictation stops
Dictation is controlled on purpose. Because students are not generating the sentence, they can devote their limited working memory to foundational skills such as spelling, handwriting, capitalization, and punctuation. That focus makes dictation useful, but it also makes it incomplete.
Students also need regular opportunities to write independently at the text level, using their own ideas and voice. That work belongs in your ELA block.
Independent writing is where these skills begin to transfer and generalize. Students need to practice spelling while composing, or spelling may remain something they do only during spelling instruction.
Research nerd alertThe study behind that last sentence
Berninger et al. (2002) randomized 96 third graders with low writing fluency to four conditions across 24 lessons.
SpellingWriting
Controlno instruction
Spelling onlyspelling alone
Composing onlywriting alone
Spell + Composetaught together
Spelling transferred to writing when students practiced it while composing. Integrating spelling instruction with composition training was the most effective approach.
Before the lesson
Create 3 to 4 decodable sentences.
Each one should carry today’s target pattern, a mix of previously taught skills for cumulative review, and basic conventions: a capital letter, spaces, and end punctuation.
