Answers for Spelling self-assessment

• Yes.
• No. You drop the e of love to form loving.
• No. You double the n of run to form running.
• No. You change the y of rely to form relied.
• No. You drop the e of love to form loved – otherwise it would be loveed, because the past-tense suffix is always ed.
• No. You double the t of jet to form jetted.
• lovly, realy, lonly, naturaly – in each case the pupil has deleted a letter at the end of the root which should not have been deleted: love+ly, real+ly, lone+ly, natural+ly.
• pennys, storys – in each word the pupil should have changed the y to i before adding the suffix (which would have been es because of the vowel i before it).
• wont, could’nt, brusht. In the first two the suffix should be n’t. (You may not think of n’t as a suffix, but rather as a short form of not; that’s a reasonable analysis and it doesn’t really affect the way you explain the spelling to pupils.) The third one should have the suffix -ed; it’s true that the past-tense suffix is sometimes spelt t, as in spelt, but this is only found in irregular verbs and brush is regular.
• sinceerly, seperate, tommorow – in each of these words it is the root rather than a suffix that is misspelt. It may be that you could help the pupil by breaking some roots down into smaller parts. For example, you could point out the similarity between separate and part (the result of a separation), and between tomorrow and the old-fashioned word morrow – i.e. separate = se+par+ate and tomorrow = to+morrow.
• their. This is a common mistake because their and there sound the same.