Developing Spelling Strategies...

CHIEKCSEROS?! (Circus) Wow!!! In my few years of student teaching I had never seen such an elaborate spelling before. I found this article enjoyable to read, due the fact that it addressed several points about spelling that I had never even thought of. Well to be honest, I had not heard of these techniques. I recall in my personal elementary school days, receiving a spelling list of twenty words a week, memorizing them, then being able to spit them back out on a piece of paper. If I missed more than the required amount, I had to take the test again on Friday, however, if I received a perfect score on the first test, I didn't have to take the next spelling test and was allowed to read a book while the Friday test was being given. What I found most interesting in this article was the dicussion on Alison and Erica. Being a pre-service teacher, I would have believed that it would have been unacceptable or maybe looked down upon is a better way to phrase it, for the girls to be asking each other how to spell words, because it is most likely that the words are going to be spelled incorrectly in the end. I would've thought that it would've been better to look the word up in a reliable source to see the correct spelling, but thanks to this article I see that yes, the spellings were still incorrect, but atleast the girls were collaborative in their spellings. Therefore, they both were learning and not doing as I had done as a student, which was just spitting the words back out from memory. Now they have a much deeper understanding of not only the words they are trying to spell, but a greater understanding of spelling as a whole!