A Relieubull Spelling Strategy

Anna and I were practicing her spelling words last night. Here's what she constructed: 

1. She is representing the sounds and syllables very well now. 

2. She knows the word lie, so she used what she knew. She knows the word bull, so she used that too. What I need her to learn now - which is FANTASTIC at her developmental stage, is to spell by derivational constancy - to spell by meaning! I asked her if she knew what the word meant. She didn't. 

3. "This word is made of a smaller word, a root word, RELY. If I can rely on you to do your chores, what does that mean?" She responded readily, "It means that you can trust me." 

4. She pulled out the letters like this: relie. "But lie means not true. How can you trust something that isn't true?" Smart girl. 

5. "You are right, Anna. Lie is a different root. It means something different. Rely sounds the same but has a different meaning, so we spell it differently. How else might we construct the word?"

6. "Relly." 

7. "That's a good start. The two l's together, though, make that e say the short sound /reh-ly/. 

8. I slid down the extra l to form the next picture.

9. So when you say that someone is reliable, you are really saying that you are ABLE to trust them. Can you form the word able? 

10 . Of course she could. The next step was to talk about changing the y to i when adding a suffix. 

And now, we have a word correctly spelled according to sounds and meaning. 

I'm a very proud Nona.