What Looks Right

 

"What Looks Right" is a spelling activity we do in class to help students develop their spelling skills.

In English, words with the same ending usually (but not always) rhyme. If you are reading and come to the unknown words plight and trite, you can easily figure out their pronunciation by recalling other ight or ite words you can already read and spell. The fact that there are two common spelling patterns with the same pronunciation is not a problem when you are trying to spell it. If you were writing and trying to spell trite or plight, they could easily be spelled tright or plite. The only way to know which is the correct spelling is to write it one way and see if it "looks right" or check your probable spelling in a dictionary. "What Looks Right" lessons help students learn how to use these two important self-monitoring spelling strategies.

The brain has a visual checking system which checks the spelling it generates with what it has seen before. Of course, if a student has never before seen the word plight in print, there would be no way for his brain's visual checking system to work. That is why the ability to use a dictionary to check the probable spelling of a word plays an important role in good spelling.

Good spellers don't spell words one letter at a time. They use the spelling patterns they know from other words. If a written word does not look right, a good speller tries another pattern for that sound.

In a "What Looks Right" lesson, we make two columns, one for each spelling pattern. In this example, the columns would be ight and ite. I say a word and write it on the board using both spelling patterns. For instance, I might write invite and invight. The students decide which one "looks right" to them and write it on their own paper. Then they use a dictionary to see if that spelling can be found.

This activity gets really interesting when we try this activity with words like might and mite!