Correct Your Spelling: A Simple Editing Strategy {Week 9}

Welcome back to Simple Writing Lessons for Primary Grades…a 12-week writing strategy series put together by The Measured Mom and myself. If you’ve missed any of the posts thus far, feel free to click HERE or on the image at the end of this post. Today, we’re on Week 9 and moving into the editing phase as you help your child edit his/her writing.

Concerns with Invented Spelling and What to Do about Them

A few weeks ago in this series, we focused on allowing your child to use invented spelling. While there are many benefits of invented spelling, there are always concerns with letting your child spell words the “wrong” way. Am I sending a message to my writer that it’s okay to spell words incorrectly (or that spelling doesn’t matter)? Will she become a poor speller? Will she learn to spell the word incorrectly forever? My answer to all these questions is a big NO… if it’s handled in an appropriate way.

If you hold children accountable to what they know, you don’t accept invented spellings of words they have already studied {like sight words or phonics patterns}. Sure, they might use them in their drafting stage. But as you move into your editing stage, you need a strategy to hold them accountable to what they know and give them resources for spelling words conventionally. And that’s what Anna, of The Measured Mom, is sharing about today: correcting spelling by using a kids’ spelling dictionary. Hop on over to check it out! 🙂

Click the image below to see all the simple writing lessons in this writing series for kids.

~Becky