Fancy a laugh? Come and see DS's spellings.

[JellycatShopkeeper]

OK, I'll just show you the interesting ones.

Amongst others he has to learn theif and hankercheif, this has come home on a photocopied sheet handed out in class.

He's Y5. I shall be speaking to the teacher.

whats the problem?

oh my life.

I was at a meeting for secondary English teachers today and a colleague had written "Good use of emmotive language" as her comment - on a piece of work with the title "Emotive writing" spelt correctly by the pupil

Not being able to spell is one thing, but teaching pupils to spell incorrectly is just appalling.

and

Not sure about monocycle, but the quadriceps is a muscle of the upper arm, I believe.

I'm stunned at the teachers' spelling mistakes - my instinctive reaction would be to get out my red pen, cross out the misspelled words, and write a note at the bottom inviting the teacher to find the correct spellings and write them out ten times each - in their best handwriting!

sunnygirl.

monocycle is an alternative to unicycle. But it isn't in the online dictionaries I use! Hardly an essential of life, was the list themed on numeric prefixes?

quadriceps is the muscle on the front of your thigh.

So - "the circus performer flexed his quadriceps as he rode his monocycle round the ring"

That is awful. I'm thinking monocycle must be one cycle of something? Seems very obscure, and not even difficult to spell - very odd

monocycle is a motorised unicycle, apparently.

A note to the teacher to query the use she expects the DC to get from that particular would may be called for, I feel.

JellyCat I would be so cross if that was DS's spellings

that particular word

• Ohhhh dear - many thanks for the correction, Grimma - I should have remembered that the quadriceps muscle is in the thigh not the upper arm.

ds spells words wrong in his test and the teacher ticks them and puts 10/10...
i correct them in red pen and put a note for teacher at the bottom of the page...
have yet to write 'see me', but it is only a matter of time i feel...
i also then retest ds to see if he does know how to spell... no-one else is going to, clearly...

I think the head teacher should know about that. What a disgrace!

Are you sure that it's the teacher correcting the test, Romy - because if that's the case, you should be showing the spelling book to the headteacher.

However, it may not be the teacher - in ds3's previous school, when he was in Year 5, the children corrected eachothers spelling tests. Each week I would ask ds3 how he'd done in his spelling tests, and as his results were always good, I thought I didn't need to get more involved in his spelling homework (testing etc). However, this assumption came crashing down around my ears when I finally got my hands on his spelling book, and found how many incorrect spellings had been marked as correct - in one case where he'd been given full marks, he'd actually only got 3 out of 20 correct!!

I did monitor the situation from then on, and things improved, thankfully!

oh no, def the teacher - he's 6 and takes the test in a group of 2-6 kids. she even writes a little 'well done' and puts a smiley face on...

on a 'test' note, if you turn dd1's test paper over, there is always a little prayer on the back - 'dear god, please let me get my spellings/ sums right. amen. love dd1'
i've never asked her about it, and afaik she doesn't 'do' praying generally, but obviously feels the need for divine intervention in these matters lol. i'm curious if she'll still be doing it at GCSE time...

Romy - that's appalling, then, and I would definitely be asking the teacher about this.

Definitely show them to the head, Romy.

And I think your DD1 may be worrying a tad too much about tests

Ds came home with some history homework.

The teacher had written a sheet of questions for the kids to answer and one of the questions she had written was:

'Can you say what William should of done in the battle.'

I circled it and put HAVE in caps, and stuck it in his history book for the teacher to see.

Was that pedantic of me?

Or should I just OF ignored it?

That is not good! By that, I am referring to all of the examples here!

I am not a good speller - which is why I double and triple check everything I give out to a class; especially if it is going home!

On the list of words things thing; a lot of schools have quite rigid spelling schemes ... this week we will be learning anti- words, or -phobia words (as a class of yr6 I had last week were doing) but it doesn't allow for less common spelling patterns. Parents always expect 10, 15, 20 spellings but sometimes it's hard to come up with enough that are suitable.

Also - just a note in defence of the teachers - remember that they are human too and that a lot of them are products of the 'we don't need to teach grammar' education system of the 80s. This does not excuse a lack of spell checking but it might afford them a little sympathy ... maybe?

I have just crossed them out and put the correct spellings for him to learn.

I shall be checking his marks very carefully on test day (Friday).