Helping Children Make Progress in Spelling (continued)

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They can find the phonemes, but so far their ideas of how these phonemes should be spelled stick closely to the names of the letters. They use letter-names as if they themselves were pieces of sound—building blocks out of which words can be constructed. They have not yet realized the complex rules for choosing letters to represent words.

If the disparity between their system and the complexity of standard spelling is pointed out to them too suddenly or too harshly, many children will lose confidence. If this happens, their progress into standard spelling will be delayed because they will not experiment with new forms enthusiastically. The greatest amount of progress may be gained if children at this stage are encouraged to continue writing—indeed, if they are given a steady agenda of interesting writing tasks. Their writing can be taken seriously for the sake of its message. The teacher or parents can talk about what the child wrote and not just her spelling—focusing on the message is likely to be more motivating than dwelling on the spelling.

If the letter-name speller is exposed to a good supply of interesting print, this should provide him with data from which he can, at his own pace, draw new conclusions about spelling. We should continue to read to him. We should continue to help him find favorite books, read them to him frequently, and encourage him to read them to himself. Read-along books can be highly beneficial at this stage, both for reading and for writing. Language-experience teaching—dictated stories that are reread together—bears even more fruit at this stage, both in the children's ease at finding words by the voice-to-print matching method and in the number of words the children can learn to recognize after a dictated story. They will now recognize words in the story days after they were dictated, a feat they could not do before.

Having children build a word bank—a collection of word cards for the words they recognized during the reading of a dictated story—is good practice. It's a good idea to check each child's word bank occasionally and see if she can still read all the words in her word bank. Any words that she cannot read should be taken out, placed in a separate envelope, and reviewed at a later time. The children can be encouraged to use their word bank cards when they are writing because they are always spelled correctly, and so constitute a source of correct spellings.

To help children sound out words and spell with more confidence, use a group brainstorming procedure. Choose an interesting word to spell and ask the students to help you spell it. Ask the students which sound they hear first. Then ask students to offer a letter to spell it. Discuss whether the letter makes sense or not. Then ask students to name the next sound they hear and suggest a letter to spell it.

Note that our goal is to have children hear sounds in words and match letters with them. We will accept reasonable guesses, even if they are not the correct spelling of the word, because we are trying to encourage the children to use invented (or temporary) spelling. Correctness will come later.

How do we describe this spelling to children? We like Elizabeth Sulzby's advice. If the children come up with ANEML, we say, "This is the way many children spell' animal''' (or whatever word they are spelling)'. We go on to make it clear that adults spell the word a little differently and they will learn that adult spelling later.
Should we teach correct spelling to children at this stage? These are several considerations here. If we do teach them correct spelling, we must be careful not to undermine their willingness to write words the way they sound. The spirit of discovery is valuable for their learning; and besides, the act of inventing spellings actually helps children learn features of the sounds and writing system of English that will help them both in their spelling and even in their reading for some time to come.

By the second half of first grade, it may be advisable to make a "door dictionary"; that is, write frequently used words on gummed note papers and post them on the back of the classroom door or filing cabinet. Children may peel a needed word off the door, take it back to the desk to copy, and return it to the door. Alternatively, you may encourage children to make a personal spelling dictionary: a notepad with frequently used words in it, spelled correctly.

In the second half of first grade, you may safely require children to memorize a short list of words per week: five or six words, we would say. We prefer to group these words by phonogram pattern, especially those patterns to which we are calling the children's attention in their reading. (A phonogram pattern is a vowel and consonant combination. It is usually what is left over when we remove the beginning element from a word: the phonogram at, for example, is found in "that," "cat," and "rat.") You or the children may wish to add other frequently asked for words: "of," "love," "have," and so on. In the next section we describe several recommended procedures for having children study words.

Care must be taken, however, not to limit the children's writing to the words on the spelling lists or in the spelling dictionaries. It would be sad, indeed, if a preoccupation with these correctly spelled words undermined their confidence in their ability to think out spellings for themselves. Their willingness to try spelling on their own is necessary for them to move beyond memorization and learn the system of English spelling.

For the Transitional Speller

Children who are transitional spellers are adept at breaking out phonemes for words and finding letters to spell them. They are moving beyond the intuitive one-sound, one-letter spelling of the previous stage. They have begun to take note of the way standard spelling works and are trying to gain control over the patterns they perceive in standard spelling.

Transitional spelling emerges gradually from letter-name spelling; it is certainly not a gear-shift change. Letter-name spellers are learning to read, and as they read, standard spelling patterns make their way into the children's spelling. When we see many of these standard spellings—ch, sh, and th digraphs; vowels with their correct short sound; silent letters; and the like—we say that these children have become transitional spellers.

As we observed in Chapter 5, the patterns of standard spelling are many and complex. It takes time, curiosity, and much exploration for a child to master these patterns. Children need to be led gradually to learn the patterns at work in standard spelling, and it is best if they learn these in the context of meaningful writing, though isolated activities are sometimes helpful.

Inductive approaches often work well for helping children learn spelling patterns. In these, children compare the spellings of several words in light of their pronunciation, meaning, part of speech, and origin. Then they are led to formulate their own generalities about the patterns that appear to be at work.

Word sorts are teacher-made or homemade activities that help children notice and form concepts about spelling patterns. Word sorts are a categorizing exercise in which children are led to group words together that share a common feature. This exercise gets them thinking about spelling features of words, and it works with words the children already know.

The procedure works as follows. The teacher or the children write down a collection of words on small pieces of tagboard. If the teacher is using the language-experience approach, the words used are those in the children's word banks. If he is not using the approach, then he or the children can jot down fifty words or so from the children's sight words on word cards. It's important for all of the participants in an activity to know the pronunciation and meaning of every word used.

With an individual or small group of children, the teacher starts off the activity by dividing the cards among the participants. Then he puts a card in the center of the table. He asks the children to read it and to put any words they have in hand that begin with the same sound on the table below the guide word. (Sometimes the teacher uses a picture of an object for a guide word, so the children cannot depend on a visual match between the first letters of the guide word and the words in their hands.) The teacher makes sure that the participating children have several cards in hand that match the guide word, as well as some that do not.