Learning Together is an Institut des troubles d’apprentissage initiative to help children overcome difficulties in French and math. Discover our activities designed to help you support them as they develop their literacy and numeracy skills!
Learning to spell is essential to understanding the meaning of words and texts. And there’s more to it than just learning spelling lists by rote! Rather, it’s a process of decoding that often involves recognizing visual and auditory patterns that are easy to identify as a child becomes familiar with words.
This sequence of 10 practical activities is designed to support Cycle 3 elementary school students by providing tools to help them understand the why and how of words and sentences.
These 10 activities are designed to fit easily into your family routine and to be done in order. They were created specifically to help children with learning disabilities, but all children can benefit from them!
You will need:
This activity presents five oral and written strategies intended to make learning to spell more enjoyable and complement the methods learned at school. It is designed to help your child memorize spelling words more effectively and retain new knowledge over the long term.
Breaking words down into syllables and sounds is very helpful for learning how to spell. This activity helps your child understand how to make the most of this method, which is useful for writing about 50% of words. Note that for more complex words, other strategies will need to be used.
About 80% of the words in the French language are made up of small units of meaning. By identifying these elements—such as prefixes and suffixes—it becomes easier to read, understand the meaning of words, and spell them correctly.
This activity teaches your child a third strategy for memorizing spellings: using visual cues and spelling patterns, which will help them better identify the correct spelling!
The purpose of this activity is to introduce your child to another method of learning spelling based on comparison. Comparing words using various phonetic, semantic, and visual clues is a key strategy for identifying their similarities!
Some kids in Cycle 3 of elementary school still have trouble building coherent, meaningful sentences, even if they’re making good progress in reading and writing. The goal of this activity is to teach your child to understand and identify the structure of a basic sentence.
In elementary school, children learn to recognize the beginning and end of a sentence using capital letters and end punctation. As they get older and start writing longer sentences, they need to master other punctuation marks such as commas. This activity focuses on learning punctuation marks once a child has mastered the structure of a sentence.
The goal of this activity is to show your child strategies for making sure that their sentences are understandable and meaningful. They need to make sure that every sentence clearly conveys their ideas, check that the words are in the right order, and make sure they don’t have too many or too few words.
This activity is designed to encourage your child to focus on the components of a sentence. In Cycle 3, children start using syntactic manipulation to practise identifying them. Being able to identify the parts of a sentence helps students build grammatical skills, formulate sentences more easily, and read more fluently.
Well done! You’ve made it to the final activity! This activity helps your child expand their sentences by adding relevant details. This will help them learn to express their ideas more precisely and clearly.
This sequence is part of a collection of tools and resources to help your child develop reading, writing, and math skills.
Check out our featured topic Learning Together to explore our entire collection of activities!
These activities were created by learning specialists Marie-Lou Laplante and Lise L’Heureux for Institut TA.