Common spelling errors in geography
These attractive slides of commonly misspelled words can be printed out as key spelling posters or else displayed one at a time while students work through the accompanying worksheet.
The PowerPoint includes a mnemonic for each of these key geographical words:
- Antarctica, Arctic, Britain, business, coastal, desert, Edinburgh, environment, erosion, forest, glacier, government, infrastructure, Ireland, pollution, resources, temperature, volcano/volcanoes, Wales, weather.
The worksheet uses a variation on the 'Look, cover, write, check' technique that has students breaking the words into syllables, thinking of other words that follow the same spelling pattern, and writing their own memorable example in a sentence. They then test their recall by writing the word without looking at the correct spelling.
There is also a word list that can be handed out as a spellings mat or bookmark.
This resource can help all students to improve their SPaG marks and disciplinary literacy, but it will be particularly useful for EAL learners or students with dyslexia.
An extract from the teaching notes:
Infrastructure
In|fra|struc|ture
Other words with similar spellings:
infrared; future, nature, picture
‘Infra’ is Latin for ‘below’, like in ‘infrared’. It is the opposite of ‘super’, like in ‘superstructure’, or ‘ultra’, like in ‘ultraviolet’.
There’s only one E in ‘infrastructure’: infra, not infer.
However, ‘infer’ is correct for the verb meaning ‘to work out on the basis of information’.
