heartofdakota.com

My daughter has VERY poor spelling. She is reading, doing copywork, dictation, etc., but she just loves to draw and write anything outside of school work. Because she can hear the sounds, she can write anything the way it sounds, so she is constantly spelling words incorrectly during 'play'. I feel like I can't keep up with spelling corrections when she is just doing it for fun. I'm afraid she will continue to spell words incorrectly because I am not correcting all that she is doing for fun. She writes notes to people. Some she will have me look at before she gives it to that person, but others i never see. She has times where she just writes and writes, because she likes to write. When she was two years old, before we adopted her, she loved to have a paper and pen and she would just make squiggly lines covering the whole paper. I'm just concerned that some misspelled words may be so engrained in her that it will be hard to get the right one to stick. Any suggestions?

Pam, I don't have any technical answer, but praise God she is communicating freely It sounds to me as if He created her with a passion for writing, and so He must have a plan for that. How exciting to see that talent grow and be used for His glory I'm sure that all the opportunities for writing in HOD will be of great benefit, and maybe the misspelling is more a maturity issue than an academic issue. I know that my youngest ds spells well when he is thinking about it, but when he is just trying to get an idea on paper, he doesn't always pay attention to spelling rules When I can, without crushing creativity, I will correct spelling and punctuation in non-academic work.

I don't usually correct non school work unless asked. DD has struggled so hard, it's a victory to see her writing on her own.

I'd maybe make a note of words she's misspelling and maybe make a weekly review time of the misspelled words.

I like the idea of keeping a running list of non-academical misspelled words. You can try finding dictation passages with those words to assign to help her work on those. Of course, when my kids are giving things away I do like to help them have them spelled right, but maybe I'm a little over-worried about that as my MIL doesn't approve of us HSing & want to give a good impression. . .

Blessings,

Thanks for the input. Keeping a list of non-academic words is a good idea. Her spelling has improved a little, but we have a long way to go. I'm glad she likes to write, but sometimes it pains me to see how she is spelling some words. I hope I see much improvement before she gets into written narrations.