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5th Grade Spelling Activities

Your 5th grade spelling activities should include:

Standard spelling word practice
Practice with words from the students' science, social studies and other content areas
Spelling and vocabulary enrichment

By fifth grade, your students' interests and abilities are varying more and more from student to student. By allowing students to explore new information in their areas of interest, it will be easier to keep your students engaged in learning. See our list of typical 5th grade spelling words here.

By this age, no doubt you'll be asking students to write about their new areas of interest. And so, they need to learn to spell the words they're using.

5th Grade Spelling Practice Activities

Here are two different activities that focus on separate skills: spelling and alphabetization. Your kids/students will enjoy these when you present them as a fun alternative to traditional workbook pages!

1. Missing Letters

The missing letters for all the words can be listed in a box -- or not

Here's a super-simple idea that's great for board work or a worksheet. Make a list of spelling words like this:

__ a v __ __ i t __ (favorite)
d __ t __ r __ __ n e (determine)
c __ __ t i __ __ n t (continent)

Ask students to fill in the blanks to complete the spelling/vocabulary words. For extra practice, ask them to write each complete word again and also use it in a sentence.

Students can write or type word lists like this for each other. This not only saves you a lot of work, it also gives students extra practice as they both make and solve these spelling words.

For another twist, ask students to make similar lists for one another, using words from content areas, such as mathematics, science and social studies. The results might look like this:

_ _ g a _ i s _ (organism)

_ _ r _ s _ _ _ (parasite)

_ _ a t _ a u (plateau)

t _ _ d r _ (tundra)

m _ _ t i _ _ _ (multiple)

_ _ v i _ _ b l _ (divisible)

Students can trade papers and supply the missing letters in each other's lists. That's the best way to learn!

Fifth Grade Spelling Words & Activities eBook

Fifth Grade Spelling Words and Activities will provide excelling spelling practice with 240 grade-level words across 12 topical units. Lots of different activities are provided to make learning enjoyable.

Learn more and download free sample pages here.

2. In Between

Dictionary skills go hand in hand with spelling skills. Here's another simple idea that challenges vocabulary and spelling skills.

Write two guide words on the board. You can think of your own guide words or get them from a dictionary. Here are two examples.

1) canyon - cat 2) strange - strike

Ask students to write one set of guide words on their papers.
Give students 2 minutes to write as many words as possible that come between the two guide words alphabetically. When time is up, have students exchange papers to check each other's accuracy. Questionable spellings should be checked in a dictionary.

Words that might be added:
1) cap, capsize, carpet, castle, carriage, cascade, capital
2) stray, strap, strength, street, stream, streak, stress, strict

For extra practice, ask students to alphabetize the words, as shown here.

Variation

Or make the activity into a classroom game. Arrange students into two teams. Write a different set of guide words on the board for each team. Set a time period of 5 or 10 minutes.

Have 1 player from each team come to the board and write 1 word under the team's guide words. As soon as the player returns to his seat, the next player writes another word, and so on. At the end of the time period, the team with the most correct words wins the round.

More Spelling Resources

Try some of our spelling worksheets and spelling word games for more fun practice. Here are just a few from our larger collections:

Fill-in crosswords: These unique puzzles use important words from our fourth grade spelling word list. Lots of puzzling fun!

Spelling word puzzlers: Students chose the correctly spelled words to complete an interesting story or eliminate extra letters to solve a word puzzle. Based on our sixth grade spelling word list.

For more fun spelling practice, try our AnyWord Spelling Practice Series. In these three eBooks, you'll find word play worksheets, writing prompts and partner games and activities that work with almost any list of spelling words!

Fifty-Fifty - Fun word game for kids. Older students earn points as they engage in word play and spelling fun. Word games for kids are one of the best ways to reinforce spelling skills. Games provide a nice change of pace for everyone!

Spelling Bee Games - Try one of our new Silent Spelling Bee variations. A fun--and quiet--twist on a classic game! Yes, it's possible to spell silently -- with the help of some dry-erase boards, or even paper and pencil! I think you'll really like these!

Check out my list of 5th Grade Vocabulary Words! It's a huge list of 200 words! Some are arranged in ten categories to engage your students in topics such as sports, adjectives, people, places, social studies, fruits and more! How about a game of hilarious racquetball on a tundra with a cartographer?

Ann Richmond Fisher is a longtime published educational writer, a former classroom teacher and a former homeschool teacher. Ann's spelling bee resources, graded spelling word lists, spelling games, worksheets, and other language arts resources have become respected around the globe since she launched Spelling-Words-Well in 2010.

Ann is also the creator of www.word-game-world.com.

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