There, Their, They're...which one to use?

They're going to put their coats over there. Which spelling to use??

The correct spelling often confuses kids. Many children can benefit from visual strategies in their learning. I was working with a girl who consistently misuses the words "there" and their". I thought I would share some ideas I had to help her decide which spelling to use.

For the word "there", the visual cue, or hook, is to think "Where is the 'r'? It's between the two 'e' letters. Where is it? It is there." Then, I stacked the words on top of each other to look like this:

You can see how the words match up, which provides another visual cue to help remember to use the spelling "there" when describing location. I realize that "there" are other meanings for the word "there", but in this girl's writing, this will help her a lot.

Next, for the word "their", I associated the lowercase "i" with a stick figure of a person. This is to cue possession, that something belongs to a person or thing. It looked something like this:

My client doesn't have trouble spelling the word "they're" correctly, so i just associated it with the two words, "they are".

These visual cues definitely helped my client remember the spellings of these tricky words. That's all there is to it!