Phonics and spelling - when does it fall into place?

[BuiltForComfort]

Ds is in yr 1, his reading has completely taken off and his writing is following now too, which is lovely to see. I don't push him as it usually has the opposite effect, and things just usually click suddenly with him anyway. So I was just wondering whether I can trust that his spelling will catch up too or if we need to work on this a little bit?

His "spelling" is fairly non existent but makes sense in terms of phonics, sometimes, so "sirkit" for "circuit"; "hart" for "heart" and a few that make me like putting t instead of ed at the end of words - eg - talkt not talked.

I have friends whose kids, at schools ranging from local state primaries to pushy preps, come home with lists of words to spell each week. Ds gets no homework other than a reading book once a week.

Is any of this a problem / unusual?

I guess they are all different. For DS it clicked gradually during Y1 and he is pretty good now. We have no spellings to learn for DS but lots of phonics teaching (re encoding rather than decoding now for him). He no longer makes the mistakes your DS does, although there are still some things to put right.

Spelling always lags slightly behind reading but will catch up as he is taught the alternative ways to spell the sounds.
Spelling lists to memorise are ineffective for most children.

We gently correct DD, she is in Year 1 as well. We did this straight from the beginning.

We parise her for spelling phonetically correct but then show her how the word is actually spelt. We explain that often one sound can be spelt differently and and that sometimes words come from a different language and therefore can be spelt differently.

We found that this really helped DD. she is confident in writing, doesn't mind being corrected and also open and wil ask herself.

We also don't get spelling lists and when I see what my friend's children will forget just a week later I doubt they are effective.

With DS it really clicked in yr2 and by the end of the year, his spelling was pretty good.

He had one term in yr2 with spelling tests (the last term IIRC) but this did not help him remember them at all. He got 10/10 every week but used to forget them when writing

My DS3 is in year 1 and his spelling has gradually improved over this year. He has picked it up way better than his older brothers but still a lot of his spellings are 'phonetically plausible' rather than correct - ie today he was making himself a passport for an imaginary trip to Spain. He wrote "This is my parse port I made to go to Spane"

He usually often gets the common words correct, such as they, what, went, away but less common words he'll have a good go. Sometimes he asks which way a word is spelled ie he will ask which way the ay sound is made in Spain but (as today) often he will have a go independently. And depending how grumpy he is on his mood I sometimes correct him but often don't as I don't want to stifle his creativity - it's weird for me having a boy who enjoys writing - both my other boys hated it.

Thanks all, very reassuring. Especially re the spelling tests, it increases my faith in school (which I rate highly already!) Ds does NOT like me to correct him, even if I suggest to him that he takes another look at a word and thinks how else he could write it. Perhaps yr 2 will be when it comes together. He is also pretty good on all the where/wear/were to/two/too spellings and today he drew himself a map of Europe and one of South America and labelled them fairly accurately in terms of geography if not spelling so I will continue to not interfere!

Sounds like he is doing great!!