Spelling

[foreverondiet]

Would like some perspective please and don't flame me!

My DD is 7 at a state (VA - faith) school. It's in a middle class suburb of London and most of the children have professional parents, however there are a few children in the class who are learning english.

She is one of the oldest in the class (y2) and according to teacher "working at a level above the class" for both maths and english. She is independently reading chapter books.

However her spelling is terrible, I think because the school do not focus on it at all.

They didn't have any spelling words in y1 this year the words are easy ones that she can already spell like "look" "here" etc.

She has written a diary for the past week recording everything she has done (her idea not mine) its several pages for each day but here are some words she can't spell:

said / saw / watch / fruit / heart / quite / early / meat / wait / scare (there are several spelling mistakes in each sentance).

I am expecting too much? My friend who has children further up the school (and is a primary teacher elsewhere) says its because the school don't teach spelling very well and I just have to accept this.

I will mention it at parents night but my friend says she's been mentioning it for years.

The school should be correcting spelling mistakes, it will help the children. You can help her at home also, it helps to say each letter phonetically.

The school will correct in her written work. This diary wasn't homework, she was just writing it for fun so teacher will not see it.

Ahh. Have you seen her school work? Children do tend to get sloppy when writing for fun. If her school work spelling is as bad then I'd raise it with her teacher.

That's good to know because I was judging my daughter's writing on her fun at home writing. It would explain why her school books looked like they belonged to someone else!!!! :) I've been worried about spelling due to DD missing most of year 1 and not having many phonics lessons. She does keep saying "mum I can spell x,y,z".

I read somewhere recently that weekly spellings might not be that helpful. I'd love to know the magic answer to spellings for my kids :)

My son's an excellent speller so I will often ask him how to spell a word so I don't have to think about how to do it myself Gives him the practice as well.

The expectation in Y2 is for children to spell common words (saw/said) correctly and to make phonetically plausible attempts at other words but none of the words you list should be a problem.

the actual wording is Spell with increasing accuracy and confidence, drawing on word recognition and knowledge of word structure, and spelling patterns including common inflections and use of double letters.
Read and spell less common alternative graphemes including trigraphs

I think I will discuss with the teacher.

Mrz a lot of the words spelt wrongly were ones I wouldn't expect her to be able to spell, eg croissant or machine. The ones listed above were the ones I was more surprised/concerned about.

Do you know how she is taught to read and write in school?

The following is a quote from the spelling KS2 spelling section from the National Curriculum:

"Spelling

1. Pupils should be taught to:

Spelling strategies a.write each letter of the alphabet b.use their knowledge of sound-symbol relationships and phonological patterns [for example, consonant clusters and vowel phonemes] c.recognise and use simple spelling patterns d.write common letter strings e.spell common words f.spell words with common prefixes and inflectional endings

Checking spelling
g.check the accuracy of their spelling, using word banks and dictionaries
h.use their knowledge of word families and other words
i.identify reasons for misspellings"

Any other documents are advisory to the schools and therefore they do not have to follow them - thus you get very different interpretations all over the UK!

candleshoe what I quoted is the assessment criteria from the National Curriculum which is how what you posted would be judged.
incidentally the child is in KS1 not in KS2

My point was that only the NC is statutory and anything else can and does vary from one school to another.

The content of the NC is statutory but how it is taught isn't

Why are you trying to start an argument with me mrz?

I was just trying to help the OP - I don't want a pointless fight.

neither do I

good - cos I already got into a punch up with some militant breastfeeders earlier and I'm worried I'll get an online ASBO if I get in any more scraps!

She is in year 2, so KS1.

I have no idea how she is taught, although they were learning spelling rules judging by some of the homework.

She is reading at roughly ORT level 11 and one of the strongest readers in the class.

Reading and spelling ability often don't match especially if the school relies on whole word learning rather than segmenting words for spelling. Most of the words you listed should be within the ability of a Y2 child using this part of the list candleshoe posted
b.use their knowledge of sound-symbol relationships and phonological patterns

I am surprised at Candleshoe's comment to Mrz. The description you posted is for children up to Year 6.

A lot of schools do not correct spellings in the early years because they want to encourage expressive writing. I expect that a lot of year 2s couldnt spell the words listed from the OP and whilst we as parents believe they should be able to, most of these words follow patterns that might or might not yet have been covered at school.

Some schools do spelling lists, patterns etc but there have been lots of posts on MN recently where there appears to be not much spelling taught in schools.

Overall, are you pleased with the content of her writing? Is she very descriptive or writing the bare minimum, is she mentioning names, places, using lots of different words etc. Is she making her stories interesting to read? Her spelling will improve once she has learnt the rules.

If you feel the school wont do enough about this (it could be your friend's kids are not good at spelling so assume the school is doing a bad job) because most schools do teach the children all they need to know.

My own kids were in KS2 at age 7! They were the youngest in the year ... so I am just plain confused. As to why my simple error is causing consternation I really am not sure.

OP. I actually typed a different post but changed it because I thought it might be totally pointless before someone else asked "how your DD was being taught to read and write" but I'll say roughly what I was going to post.

My DD sounds like she's at a similar reading level. You can certainly get pretty far on whole word recognition because my DD did. I felt that because she had a good word memory and was further on than where the phonics was being taught abroad it held her back with her writing and spelling. I wonder if she's zoomed on with her reading and hasn't quite held onto the phonics. The reason I think my daughter is starting to spell better than before (I'd say her spelling didn't match everything else) is because the phonics is starting to click. I haven't asked her but I'd say she could spell said / saw / heart / quite /meat / wait. The others I'm not sure but that is progress. DS in reception has covered more phonemes than what DD had by the start of year 2 due to the differences in curriculums but I had tried lots of random efforts to teach DD so she would have picked up some little bits. I think the UK school has put the time in with her now so the confidence is there + seeing the words more frequently has helped. Ohh and I just remembered the one thing that also helped was that in Australia they only gave her high frequency words for spellings and when she arrived here I noticed a huge difference if they added some words to the spellings that could be sounded out. We discussed this with the teacher and realised it was a good way forward.

I hope this helps and makes a little sense as it's getting late. Good luck.

Although my son (Y2) is given spelling lists every week (with very challenging words) and is a very strong reader, his own writing is notable mainly for poor spelling both of simple "high frequency" words and of more difficult ones. I was concerned about his writing/spelling until I visited my parents recently and found a folder in which my mother had saved some of my own school work. I was surprised to see my own writing (age 6 and 7) was full of spelling errors (some corrected and some not... teacher obviously didn't care much about spelling!). Since then, I have relaxed. Somewhere along the way, I learned to spell and the early mistakes haven't caused me any problems. I now don't even make my son spend too much time learning his spelling words. As long as he writes them out or spells them aloud once or twice, I'm happy. (Before anyone chastises me -- I do think spelling is important and I do think children should be encouraged to spell correctly as they progress through their education. I just don't worry anymore about my 6 year old son's spelling as long as I see he is making reasonable progress.)