Brendan Culligan - Helping the Struggling Speller

Brendan Culligan will examine spelling as a skill and also as a developmental process.

It will explore reasons why children struggle with spelling and what can be done to overcome these difficulties. It will also examine strategies to aid spelling development.

Using case studies, it will show how to detect spelling difficulties and suggest methodologies. Participants will have an increased awareness of spelling as a skill and how spelling develops. They will be able to examine children's writing and detect strengths and weaknesses and build up a profile of the child's spelling development.

It will also lead participants to reflect on their own classroom practice and how the quality of errors determines spelling improvement.

Brendan Culligan:

Although I was born and reared in Killarney, Co. Kerry, all my years in education have been spent in Dublin. Thirty of these years were as a primary school teacher. From early in my career, I always had a great interest in literacy development, especially in those children who for whatever reason found reading and writing difficult. Resulting from this interest, half of my time in Primary Education was devoted to learning support teaching. Leaving Primary Education in 2001, I spent another fifteen years lecturing in initial teacher training, both in Froebel College of Education and Marino Institute of Education. Since leaving initial teaching training, I have been proving professional development courses in schools and in Education Centres nationwide. I have also provided guidance for parents’ groups, both in person and online.