K–5 spelling
Kindergarten starts by matching sounds to letters. By 5th grade, students are spelling multisyllabic academic words built from Greek and Latin word parts. This page walks through what changes at each grade in between — and links you to the grade you need.
The early grades build and expand the alphabetic code: matching sounds to letters, then layering in digraphs, blends, and vowel patterns. The middle grades add word structure — prefixes, suffixes, syllables, and word parts that carry meaning as well as sound. The later grades bring all of it together in longer, more academic words, including word parts drawn from Greek and Latin.
At every grade, this comes together through Core Spelling, High-Frequency Words, and Themed Spelling Practice — grade labels organize the curriculum, but learners can move to whatever grade fits.
Kindergarten begins with first words and short-vowel spelling, then brings the five short vowels together and introduces consonant digraphs. High-frequency word sets and familiar themes give children more places to notice letters, sounds, and complete written words.
Example spellings: cat · dog · sun
The starting point: connect spoken sounds to letters and hold a whole word in mind.
Explore Kindergarten spellingFirst grade strengthens short-vowel spelling through the C/K and FLOSS rules, then extends into digraphs, blends, silent-e words, vowel teams, inflectional endings, r-controlled vowels, and reliable endings like tch and dge.
Example spellings: cake · ride · home
What changes: students now work across a wider range of patterns and start choosing among several spellings for the same sound.
Explore 1st Grade spellingSecond grade widens the vowel system with long e, long i, oi/oy, ou/ow, oo, and au/aw, and adds soft c and g, two-syllable words, final stable le, silent letters, compound words, and contractions.
Example spellings: rabbit · basket · picnic
What changes: mostly one-syllable pattern work gives way to longer words and a wider range of spelling choices.
Explore 2nd Grade spellingThird grade makes word parts explicit: prefixes, suffixes, suffix spelling changes, possessives, multisyllabic words, homophones, and root-word families like act, form, port, and sign.
Example spellings: report · signal · action
What changes: students now analyze how a word is put together, not just how it sounds.
Explore 3rd Grade spellingFourth grade develops multisyllabic academic spelling alongside advanced prefixes and suffixes, Latin roots such as port, dict, spect, rupt, and struct, commonly confused words, and derived words.
Example spellings: transport · predict · construct
What changes: morphology goes deeper — students connect stable Latin word parts to longer, more academic words.
Explore 4th Grade spellingFifth grade brings everything together through multisyllabic academic words, combined prefix-and-suffix work, Greek and Latin word parts such as photo, graph, tele, and scope, commonly confused words, and spelling changes across related word families.
Example spellings: photography · transportation · description
What changes: it becomes the capstone — sound, pattern, syllable, and meaning combine to spell increasingly sophisticated words.
Explore 5th Grade spellingNo grade stands alone. The sound-and-letter work from Kindergarten still underlies the Greek and Latin word parts students spell in 5th grade — each grade adds a layer without replacing the one before it. Grade levels show where spelling patterns and concepts appear in the SpellingWords curriculum, and students can review earlier material or explore other grades when that practice is useful.
