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5. The right to learn that spelling does matter
Teachers sometimes tell me that their fourth- and fifth-grade students who have been doing invented spelling since kindergarten resist standard spelling and seem to feel, "Hey, if you can read it, what's the problem?" We need to help children realize that invented spelling is a way to get your thoughts down when you don't know how to spell a word, but that eventually we want them to be able to get most words right in their first drafts, like most adults do. I think probably the biggest pet peeve of upper-grade teachers is kids' continuing to use invented spellings of common words: they is THAY, girl is GRIL, said is SIAD. All of these
invented spellings are logical (THAY because of the long a sound, GRIL because you hear the r right after the g, SIAD because the sound is short e and therefore one order of the vowels seems as logical as the other), but they tend to be annoying because writers use these words so often.
However, a minilesson that addresses the underlying issue--getting words wrong that you really should know--can be extremely effective. I begin by talking with children about the words that they always get right (the, their own names) and why it is that they're so easy to get right. Then we briefly discuss the words that they'll probably have to use invented spelling for if they write them (dinosaur names, Mississippi, and so on). Finally, I focus on the group of words that are the real topic of the minilesson: words that children use frequently in their writing and either "sort of" know but don't always get right, find that they're always correcting when they edit, or often have pointed out by the teacher as missed when they're editing. These are, we agree, words that they almost know, that they could get right all the time if they tried a little harder. Perhaps taking an extra second or two could be the answer; use the time to try the word another way and see which way looks right, think about the spelling, or remember, "Oh yeah, this is that word I keep missing." Students are quick to agree that a good name for these words is "one-second words," and that the trade-off between time and accuracy falls on the side of trying to get these words right in the first draft to save editing time later on.
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