Inventive spelling letter to parents

Invented Spelling: Filling in the Blanks for Parents

November 28, 2017 | English Language Arts

Whether you call it invented spelling, inventive spelling, or kid spelling, if you’re an early elementary school teacher, you’ve probably become an expert at decoding it. But parents who are unfamiliar with the process may be confused when writing samples come home riddled with “misspellings” and are quite difficult to read. They may start to worry that their child is struggling with spelling when, in fact, he is making appropriate progress.

You can help parents understand the concept of invented spelling by sharing these three points when they raise questions about their child’s spelling abilities.

Invented spelling is just a step in the process

Young independent writers who are just starting with formal spelling and phonics instruction rely heavily on invented spelling. They usually begin by writing the letters that represent the first and final sounds in a word. With more practice, they gradually begin to include middle sounds by adding vowels and additional consonants.

As your child progresses further through spelling development, he acquires a better understanding of the word structure and how to apply prefixes and suffixes, silent consonants, and alternative/irregular spellings.

Invented spelling is not sloppy spelling.

Sloppy and rushed work means students are continually misspelling words they already know. But, through invented spelling, children are demonstrating their grasp of letter sounds and early phonetic awareness. A recent study showed that kindergarten students who relied heavily on invented spelling showed stronger literacy skills a year later.

Your child is not doomed to be a bad speller.

Your child may struggle with spelling now because he hasn’t had enough exposure to reading and writing to fully develop his spelling skills. But even students who are heavy readers can still struggle with spelling because their visual memories can’t always recall what a word should look like. With continued practice, both in the classroom and at home, young children can overcome these spelling struggles.

Continue to stress to parents the correlation between reading and writing at home and successful spelling. The more a child sees a word in print or writes it on his own, the more likely he is to spell it correctly. Also, encourage parents to help their child sound out words and help him spell words properly when he is struggling.

In the classroom, keep your lessons for phonics and phonemic awareness going strong. Focused instruction and practice can get students on their way to conventional spelling.

Check out these tools to support parents in the home and to reinforce your phonics teaching in the classroom:

Through children’s writing samples, parents will be able to understand their child’s developmental writing stages, including invented spelling. They’ll learn many valuable tips and strategies to support young writers.

These phonics assessments are quick checks to help you determine areas of weakness and subsequent growth for each student.

Motivational, research-based workbooks take a systematic approach to direct phonics instruction. Step-by-step lessons help students work through advancing levels of phonemic awareness and sound-letter knowledge. As skills are mastered, students lessen their dependence on invented spelling.

Using visual support for common vocabulary words can help students expand their word knowledge and advance to conventional spelling. This resource is especially helpful for English Learners (ELs).

Picture Dictionary

Expand word knowledge using visual representations of 750 common vocabulary words. Editions in English and English-Spanish are available.

View Product →

Contents:

Invented spelling do's and don'ts

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What do you know about invented spelling?  I find that it’s a concept which is often misunderstood.  To help clear up the confusion I’m sharing invented spelling guidelines for parents.

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Welcome to Lesson 8 in the Preschool & Kindergarten Writing Lesson series from This Reading Mama and me!  So far we’ve shared a variety of tips to help you teach your young writers at home or in the classroom.  One thing we’ve emphasized is that all children learn to write at their own pace and level of development.

This is most evident when we look at children’s spelling.

Here’s a drawing by my almost-four-yearold.  Can you decipher his writing?  It says “octopus.”  Clearly my almost-Four “invented” his own spelling.  And even thought I’m a grammar nerd* who thinks that being a copy editor is a dream job, I’m thrilled with what he was able to do on his own.

(*Fellow grammar nerds, you might appreciate how I agonized over the spelling of “do’s and don’ts” in this post.  Even though what I went with is technically grammatically incorrect (do’s should be dos),  it looks right and makes the pronunciation evident.  So I’m sticking to it.)

Invented spelling (sometimes called phonetic spelling) is when children spell words the best they can using their phonics knowledge.  As children grow as readers and writers, their invented spelling looks begins to look more like conventional spelling, until it disappears altogether.

How can we help our children make the most of invented spelling while also guiding them on the path to conventional spelling?  Read on.

The Don’ts of Invented Spelling

1. Don’t expect all early writers to be capable of the same thing when they are the same age.   When our children start to talk, we don’t expect perfection.  “I are hungry” isn’t cause for concern; it’s a reason to celebrate that our children are experimenting with language.

When they learn to read, some children will grasp the concept of  “sounding it out” when they’re preschoolers.  Other children might be in first grade.

Kids learn to spell at different stages too.  It’s important to understand what those stages are so we can celebrate what our children are able to do. To learn more about the spelling stages, visit this post.

2. Don’t view invented spelling as a crutch.  It’s actually very valuable for early writers!  When children have to stretch out words and hear every sound, they’re exercising their phonics knowledge.  Reading back their writing is a phonics exercise, too!

3. Don’t avoid invented spelling by giving every spelling that your child asks for.  Do you have a child who doesn’t want to invent spellings?  A child who’s such a perfectionist that he won’t write a word unless he can spell it correctly?  Believe me, I understand. My Five (not yet in kindergarten) is one of those kids.  It’s temping to avoid the battle and give our children the spellings they want. But by doing that we’re crippling them. How will they ever have the confidence to spell when we’re not around?

When my Five was writing this page, he wanted to spell the word “cake.”  I wanted him to puzzle it out for himself.  Even though he’s a very good reader, I suspected that he did not understand the vowel-consonant-e spelling pattern.  He needed to work this out himself.  When I said I wouldn’t give him the spelling, he cried.  He didn’t want to keep working.

I finally convinced him to give it a go.  “If you write the word your own way, I will show you how to spell it when you’re done.  But remember that your writing notebook is a record of what you’ve learned, so we won’t go back and change it.”

When my sister taught kindergarten, if a child asked her if his spelling was correct she’d say, “That spelling is right for today.”

4. Don’t allow careless spelling.  In my experience, some parents and teachers misunderstand invented spelling.  They think that a rough draft is a “sloppy copy” in which children can throw spelling and grammar out the window because they are just “getting their ideas onto paper.”  I disagree.

Children should be held accountable for what they know.  For very young children, that may mean writing an E that takes up part of the paper and not the whole thing. Eventually it may mean writing the E correctly and not backward.  For my Four, it means writing “the” correctly, because this is a word he’s known a long time.  I can expect my Five to leave spaces between words and to spell CVC (as in hat) correctly all the time.   For older children with spelling lists, we can expect them to spell those words correctly after they’ve learned them.

5. Don’t leave all the writing and spelling instruction to your child’s teacher.  I know it can be hard to find time to write at home, particularly if your child attends school, but if we leave it all to the teacher, how will we know what our children are capable of?  By writing at least a few times a week with your child, you’ll know what he can do and what to expect.  Check out my post about how to motivate kids to write at home if you’re ready to get started.

The Do’s of Invented Spelling

  1. Do remember that early writing looks different for every child.   I know I said this already, but it’s so important.  Early spellers may use just a single letter for words.  Gradually they’ll add ending sounds.  Eventually they’ll add the middle.  We want to recognize and celebrate where our children are at developmentally. Check out my post about teaching tips for the early stages of writing.

2. Do encourage children to write words they can’t spell.  My Four drew a picture of Pete the Cat.  When I asked him about it, he told me that Pete was on the beach.

“Great! You can write ‘on the beach.'”

“I don’t know how to write it.”

“You can do it!  I’ll help you write the sounds you hear.”

3. Do give hints to help.  For the very earliest writers, help them listen for the sound at the beginning of the word and write the correct letter.  Later you’ll be able to streeeetch out the word with them and help them write the sounds they hear. (A rubber band is a great visual for this.)

When my Five was writing a thank you note, he didn’t know how to spell “dear.”  Since this was a word he’d be using a lot, I wanted him to be able to spell it correctly. But I didn’t want to just hand him the spelling. So I asked if he could spell the word “ear.”  I helped him spell “ear” and showed him how he could make the word “dear” using that spelling.

When is it okay to just give a spelling?  Here’s the question I ask myself: “Will giving the spelling help my child for the future?”  If my Five asks how to spell the number word “two,” I’ll tell him. I know he’ll remember it, and it’s an important word to know. If he asks how to spell “alligator,” I’ll ask him to streeetch out the word and write the sounds he hears.  He’ll learn much more from puzzling that word out than from me handing the spelling to him.

6. Do provide resources to help your child spell.

I love to provide charts that my kids can use to help them with spelling.  Your youngest writer will benefit from an alphabet sound chart.  I created one with capital letters, because the very earliest writers typically write with just capital letters.  You can get this useful, simple chart by clicking HERE.

Older writers will benefit from the second beginning sound chart in the picture.  It can be found in the appendix of This Reading Mama’s fabulous e-book, Teaching Kids to Spell.  The other two charts can also be found in the appendix.

Be sure to check out the rest of the posts in our Preschool & Kindergarten Writing Lessons series!

Free Spelling Games

Get this fun variety of sample spelling games from the membership site! The download includes resources for spelling CVCE words, long vowel teams, and multi-syllable words.

But if for an adult writing is a highly automated skill, then for a student it is a complex process that is formed consciously in the learning process.

The letter consists of a chain of successive actions. To write a word, the child must determine its sound structure, the sequence and place of each sound, correlate the selected sound with a certain image of the letter, reproduce the letter with the help of hand movements. In order to write a sentence, it is necessary to mentally build it, speak it, maintain the desired order of writing, break the sentence into its constituent words, and mark the boundaries of each word.

Some children have great difficulty learning these skills. Children, knowing the alphabet, find it difficult to compose a word from letters or make mistakes when writing it (omission, replacement of letters, designation of softness of consonants, writing prepositions with words together; separate spelling of words, etc.).

Parents are not always able to explain why their children make mistakes. Many people think that this is inattention and, trying to correct mistakes, they begin to work intensively with the child on writing from dictation. The child develops a negative attitude towards writing. To avoid this, it is necessary to analyze the child's mistakes.

Mistakes such as omission of vowels, permutation of letters, additions of letters, omissions, additions, permutations of syllables, merged spelling of words, separate spelling of words, merged spelling of prepositions with other words, separate spelling of prefixes and roots arise due to difficulty in dividing sentences into words , words into syllables, sounds. Replacement of letters denoting whistling and hissing, voiced and deaf, hard and soft u, o-y e-i) are observed due to a violation of differentiation, recognition of close speech sounds. Sometimes the writing reflects a faulty pronunciation. The reason for the occurrence of substitutions and distortions in the writing of graphically similar handwritten letters (i-sh, p-t, t-sh, v-d, b-d, l-m, e-s, etc.) is the lack of formation of visual-spatial representations. The underdevelopment of the grammatical structure of speech in writing is manifested in a change in case endings, incorrect use of prepositions, gender, number, omissions of sentence members, violations of the sequence of words in a sentence, etc.

If there are any of the constantly recurring specific mistakes in the child's work, then we can talk about a violation of writing (dysgraphia), which is a serious obstacle in the acquisition of literacy by students at the initial stages and mastering the grammar of the native language at later stages.

In this case, it is necessary to contact a school teacher-speech therapist. In addition to the work of a speech therapist to correct dysgraphia, parents should also be active in helping to overcome speech therapy errors in writing in their children.

• Pay attention to hygienic rules for writing (correct posture when writing, holding the pen correctly, tilting the notebook).
• When choosing stationery, choose pens or pencils with ribbed or pimpled finishes. Massaging the pads of the fingers is important for the proper functioning of the brain when writing.
• The main task in handwriting correction will be writing small texts in a notebook in a cell, where each letter is written in a separate cell. Small handwriting is more difficult to correct than large and uneven.
• If the school asks you to write long texts, break it up into parts and write it down, pronouncing each word.
• When copying, it is necessary to teach the child as early as possible to memorize the syllable, not the letter, since the syllable is the main unit in reading and writing.
• Every day write short dictations with a pencil, but do not correct mistakes, but mark the words in which they are made. The child will be able not to cross out, but to find and erase his mistakes, write correctly.
• Be sure to teach your child to pronounce the words when writing, first out loud, then in a whisper, a hidden inner voice. If pronunciation is prohibited, the writing becomes worse, the number of errors associated with missing letters increases. When pronouncing a word by syllables, the student's visual and auditory channels of perception are included in the work.
• Use surfaces around the house to display posters and signs to help your child remember the correct spelling of words.
• Praise your child for every success.
• Evaluate the child's work, not the child.

• Do not force your child to read large texts, write large dictations with him.
• Don't try to speed up your reading.
• Do not make homework rewritten many times, this will not only increase the number of mistakes, but also instill uncertainty in the child.
• Exclude jobs of type "Fix the bug". Teach them not to make mistakes, but do not offer to correct them.
• If you decide to teach your child to write without errors, then do not pay attention to ugly handwriting. Don't try to fix all bugs at the same time.
• Do not get irritated, do not scold, and even more so, do not punish the child if he makes a mistake.
• Do not praise without reason.

We must not forget that a child should only hear competent speech in the family, see books in the hands of parents, feel your love and care. The child needs help, and if he persistently studies under your guidance, he will be able to master reading and writing. Good luck!

Teacher-speech therapist TPMPC
I.V. Lavrekha

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