Spelling Stars
Primary 3 spelling words: compound words
- football
- toothbrush
- playground
- sunflower
- rainbow
- bedroom
- birthday
- breakfast
- butterfly
- classroom
- cupboard
- doorway
- downstairs
- everyone
- fireplace
- homework
- keyboard
- newspaper
- notebook
- pancake
- raincoat
- sandcastle
- snowman
- sunshine
- weekend
How to practise these words
A compound word looks long and frightening until a child sees the two ordinary words hiding in it, so the first job is to find the join. Ask your child to say where the word breaks, write the two halves apart, then write them together with no gap and no hyphen. Most of the list gives itself away this way, which is why compound words are a good confidence list. Two of them do not: "cupboard" and "breakfast" are compounds whose pronunciation has drifted away from their spelling, and those two are learnt by sight like any other awkward word. Watch for the opposite mistake as well, where a child who has understood the pattern starts writing two words as one when they should stay apart.
Where these words come from
These are common compounds drawn from public-domain frequency lists and from the ordinary vocabulary of a Primary 3 classroom, chosen because each one is built from two words a child at this level can already spell. No school's own list was used.