Writing and Spelling - Cause for Concern

[SoulSista85]

Sorry if this is a topic that has already been raised.

My daughter is in year one now and we are having issues in that she is being taught to write in cursive and spell words as they sound - in short: incorrectly.

She can barely read her own writing and I can't either.

When addressing this with her teacher and his TA, I was told that this is the National Curriculum now and that this is the way writing is taught, pure and simple.

She can read perfectly well as the text in her books is all standard font.

It just strikes me as absolutely bonkers that this is what they're teaching in schools.

Anyone else having any issues along this vein?

It would be helpful to read other people's tips and experiences as I feel at a loose end with my child who is confused, being taught to spell incorrectly and can't read her own writing because of a frankly fucked up way of learning.

It is the national curriculum. All children are taught using a phonics based approach. She will be being taught all the sounds in the English lanuage, all the various ways of spelling them and which words use which variation.
Obviously at this stage she is early on in the process so phonetic 'mis-spelling' is to be expected. By now she should have a bank of words that she can spell correctly. The rest should be phonetically plausible and readable for the most part. At the very least she should know what most of it says!
There is huge amounts of evidence to show that this approach is the most successful in the long term. I have to say I believe in a more mixed approach involving learning key words as well. However I have to say we have been really pushing the phonics at our school over the last 2 years and the results have been impressive. The children coming through are much better spellers than the previous years groups.
In my school the children are not expected to write using cursive script in year one. That does seem a little silly.
If you feel the approach is not working for your daughter I suggest you get some books/clash are etc and supplement her learning yourself. I'm afraid school is not going to be changing their approach anytime soon!

Bear with it. Seems crazy at first, but it does work. Just differently from the way we did it!

The handwriting thing - it looks awful to start with, but then it's over and done with and they don't have to re-learn it all to learn cursive later on. Was a real struggle for DS in reception, he could barely draw a circle and they were trying to get him to write these letters with curly bits all over! But starting to see the benefits in Yr 1 and I'm sure you will soon too.

They're not taught to spell words incorrectly. What they are taught is if they don't know the spelling, they should have a go using their phonics - "spelling it as it sounds" I guess. It means they're able to communicate what they're thinking and start working on things like different writing formats (story, recount, letter, postcard, email, poem...) and making their writing interesting in parallel with learning to spell. Phonics lessons will continue teaching them different ways of spelling sounds and which ones to use when so they are learning to spell correctly.

Sounds like your DD is finding it hard still. Maybe time to go back to basics and practice letter formation with her a bit more? By this stage most of them are legible if not always neat. Is it in fact cursive (joined up) they're teaching, or a pre-cursive style (letters with lead-ins and lead-outs ready to be joined)? If the former, she might benefit from some more time with the latter. But sure her teacher is best positioned to advise. Perhaps now you've got your frustration at the methods out of the system, you could have another chat with the teacher about how best to help her?

PS or it could work conversely, we found DS writing became much more legible when he moved from pre-cursive to joined up. For one thing, he had to keep the letters of a word in the same quarter of the page!

No it isn't the National Curriculum. There is nowhere in the curriculum that SATs children should be taught cursive handwriting in Year 1, only that children should be taught to form letters correctly or that they should be taught to spell words incorrectly - that's not phonics! Yes children should be taught to spell words using the sounds they can hear when they say the word but they should also be taught which is the correct spelling for those sounds in the word they want to write (use an alphabetic code chart). The more often they see a word written incorrectly (or write a word incorrectly themselves) the great the chance is that spelling will become automatic.

At year 1 phonic misspelling is completely to be expected. Yes, she will be taught correct spelling and which sounds belong in which word but when she is writing independently (as she should) then she will be expected to sound out and choose the sound she thinks is correct.
Getting hung up on correct spelling can hamper children's writing in my experience. If you've been given 20 minutes to write in and you spend 10 minutes of that time agonising over which spelling of the 'ai' sound to use you're not going to have written very much.

Expected but not ignored ... Children need to know which spelling to use for the sounds in the word they want to write. Praise the child for correctly identifying the sounds in the word, ask if they remember another way to spell the sound, if they do praise them and tell them that's how it's spelt in this word, if they don't simply tell them how to spell the sound in the word and get them to correct it.

It improves the writing and the child's confidence and takes a few seconds.

Of course if the child can't hear the sounds in the word then there is a whole different issue to be tackled.

Phonics is how most literacy programs are geared up to teach children to read and write. It gives them quick success, I wouldn't say it gets them into bad habits as long as spellings develop quickly over time and once they learn a new spelling they then use and apply this in own writing.

It would be impossible to teach children all spellings by this point in year 1. It is called a phonically plausible attempt and this is still listed within the new curriculum at year 1 level.

They are expected to spell some words correctly and these are often the high frequency words and common tricky words to begin with, lots of schools use a phonics program and these words often run alongside. E.g. it's more important at year 1, for a child to spell 'some' correctly than it is 'hibernating'. At this point of the year I'd expect 'some' to be correct and 'hibernating' to be phonically plausible e.g it may look like 'hibernaiting'

In relation to cursive, I find that most children have achieved this by February year 1 however we teach from nursery. Not that all of nursery have perfected cursive script but everything was geared up for these shapes. Ball and stick formation is a completely different formation pattern to cursive and has no automatic progression. It makes far more sense to start with cursive. There should be no extra loopy bits though just leading and leaving strokes with every letter beginning on the line.

With DS1 (Y1 as well) I was unsure at first what to do when he took the initiative to write things by himself and I could see some words had misspellings. My first instinct was to correct them, but at the same time I wanted to praise him and focus on the fact he had actually wrote something and got his message across.

I remember one time he wrote “No girls aloud” as part of a secret club game he was playing at the time with his friends. I smiled, while I heard all about the club and the game, praised him, but didn’t spoil his enthusiasm. Then after a few days, we were talking about it and I made a joke that his club only didn’t allow girls who were talking aloud. He said that’s not what I meant. I said that’s what you wrote. Explained the difference between aloud and allowed and right away he went to correct it and never made the same mistake. He actually wanted to know the correct spelling so he could write it properly. So from then on, I don’t worry about whether I should or not correct his spelling mistakes.

I agree with mrz that misspelling is to be expected at that age, but doesn’t have to be ignored.

It's more than possible to teach all the most common alternative spellings for the sounds and to teach others as and when encountered just as we do when teaching "tricky" high frequency words.

I always wonder how you organise your class to be able to teach like that mrz. It's exactly how I work with my y1 DD, 1:1 at home, but am impressed that you can do it in a whole class. How do you set up your writing activities?

Whole class - children know to ask if they are unsure which alternative to use but as I'm moving round the class I will point out changes. Often they notice themselves when they read through what they have written.
In Y1 they rarely write more than a side of A4 so not a huge amount of text to scan and this year I have a small class which is a definite advantage.

If you want to know more about Phonics, and how to help and encourage your child, try this:

An inexpensive and easy to use book, that can encourage children with reading, spelling and writing, and really help them to understand Phonics, is reviewed in the MN Book Reviews section. Just search ‘Phonics’.

Thank you everyone. This is really helpful.

Surely your year ones haven't finished phonics instruction. How do they know all the alternatives? I don't quite see how you do that if you don't mind me saying seeing as one target could be I can spell because correctly. It just doesn't sound like classrooms work. If its an obvious use of a spelling j and dge then they are learning that from the get go but really? I have not never heard of complex spelling corrections being done in y1. You would be there all day. Surely the children have target common words.

And one of the golden rules of phonics is to never ask a young child if something looks right because they haven't seen it enough times to know. In fact correct spelling of non phonological words is entirely due to the strength and capacity of that persons visual memory.

Firstly there aren't any non phonological words to correct poppy!
But to answer your first post, no they haven't covered every single alternative spelling for the sounds, just the majority including (and most could tell you 10 ways to spell the sound /ay/ others could tell you 6)
Of course they don't always know which version to use In every word but they are beginning to recognise (without anyone asking) if a word looks right and because they know there are alternatives they aren't afraid to ask if they are unsure. They are encouraged to ask "which /ay/ is it in ballet? or which /m/ is it in climb?

"entirely due to the strength and capacity of that persons visual memory."

I don't think that's right. For starters, I believe "muscle memory" from writing words out (reinforced by rehearsing the sounds as you write) has been shown to be helpful in embedding variant spellings. That's why it's important to combine encoding (spelling/writing with decoding/reading.

Then there is splitting things into syllables (also associated with rehearsing sounds). And mnemonics. And many good spellers also use a kind of memorised associated phonic "alternate pronunciation" to help them remember odd spellings: for example, mentally enunciating the word Wednesday as "wed-nes-day" as they write it.

That's just off the top of my head - there may be more. Strong phonic knowledge is key to all these approaches, however.

I missed your point about classroom targets poppy ... Truth is I would never set a target like "I can spell because correctly" ... why would I?

Because it's a HFW, mrz

I think where all children are at or above age related expectations then in theory it would be possible to teach this way. In normal classrooms all over the country this is not the case and these children also need to have success with writing. This is not due to poor teaching just the simple fact that the average child will not have begun the end of phase 5 phonics (or equivalent) until later in the year.

The curriculum has the phrase "phonically plausible" which suggests this is a year 1 expectation. In most classrooms the teaching of high frequency words would be required alongside phonics as in average classrooms the words some and come (as an example) are needed to be written correctly before the alternative spelling was taught. Clearly amongst others. Unless of course you are suggesting children only use the phonics they know and nothing else, but I don't think you are.

How, out of interest, would you explain the words because or queue, in phonic terms, to the average year 1 child? (Not a child working within year 2 or 3 expectations)

They know is a spelling for /we/ is a spelling for /or/ and is spelling for /s/

Berber the majority of my class are working at Y1 expectation not Y2 !