"Welches" wrote:


"dejablues" wrote in message
...

"Rosalie B." wrote in message
...
My niece is considering sending her child to private school because
they don't have spelling in the her son's class. The reason given is
that some people in the class are not native English speakers. Does
that reason make sense to anyone? It doesn't to me.

You did not say how old this child is. Elementary age, I guess, because
spelling here is not taught here after 5th or 6th grade. They get points
off a writing assignment if they misspell words, but it is not actively
taught, and children have been using spellcheck for a long time by that
point anyway.

Proper spelling is something you get from reading and writing a lot.
Mostly from reading. "Teaching" spelling does no good unless a child
reads, writes, and is constantly exposed to written language in all
aspects of life, not just school.
That being said, some people are just "spelling blind". It's just not
something they get.
If your sister wants her grandchild to be a good speller, she needs to
make sure he's a good reader.

Good reader doesn't necessarily equal good speller. I was an avid reader, I
read Lord of the Rings at 6yo. But I still can't spell. At times I can't
even get close enough to the word for the spell check to recognise it. I've
been asking #1 (age now 9yo) to spell words for me for a good couple of
years.

I agree - I never learned to spell until I learned to type and had to
look at all the letters in the word. (That's why I could never get
into all those Russian novels that people want you to read - I
couldn't tell the characters apart.)

Dh never has a problem on spelling, and never did. He just seems to do it
naturally, and sometimes thinks I'm messing around when I can't spell a word
because it seems so obvious to him.

#1's been having spelling tests in school since she was year 1 (age 5-6) but
they tend not to corrrect spellings in the writing as they're concentrating
on the "flow" rather than the spellings. This hinders her because she likes
to be correct, so she'll only write words she's confident of spelling
correctly.

The non-English speaker suggestion sounds like an excuse rather than the
real reason to me.
Debbie

My sister has always spelled well which is perhaps why she thinks it
is important.

Would your daughter be more adventurous with what she wrote if her
spelling was corrected by the teacher, or would she be even more
cautious - not wanting to mess up?

I have myself taught writing without the correcting of the spelling in
order to facilitate the child actually getting over the barrier or
putting words on paper. I used to make my sixth graders spend 10
minutes a day writing. Anything they wanted to write, but they had to
write. I didn't grade the content or the spelling. If they wanted
to, they could even copy out of a textbook. Just so they did 10
minutes of writing.

I also gave them a quarter project where they had to write at least a
paragraph telling everything that they saw from a specific location
three times a week. No time limit or space limit. They just had to
sit in a location they picked and described it in a paragraph.