Misspelled Words – Fifth Grade

Children tend to misspell the same words; a small number of words make up most of the spelling errors. Our school provided us with a fifth grade word list containing frequently misspelled words.

Frequently Misspelled Words

The following 67 words are frequently spelled incorrectly by young students.

Source: Montgomery County Public Schools, MD (Adapted from the Dolch 500 word list, Pat Cunningham’s Month by Month Phonics, and Fry and Kress’ Reading Teacher’s Book of Lists.)

Embarrassingly, I misspelled a few of these words while generating this table – yikes! Also, here’s a few tricks I use to remember some of these tricky words:

• alright vs. all right – scholars prefer two words to one so just remember to keep it safe and separate
• athlete- make sure you do not add an “e” and say “athelete”
• dessert vs. desert – dessert has one more S – just like you always want 1 more dessert
• receive – the golden rule “I” before “e” except after “c”
• probably – try to pronounce the word correctly, do not say, “probly”
• government – another one that people often pronounce incorrectly, make sure you say the “n”

Help your child master these words, print out this list and review each word. Consider exaggerating each syllable so a child can hear the individual components of the word. Use index cards and spelling bees can be another way to help a child overcome these common spelling errors and learn how to spell these spelling demons.