I not only allow invented spelling in my second-graders’ writing: I require it.
Here’s why:
I expect second-graders to begin the year able to write a coherent, sequenced story of at least five sentences describing an event that has occurred in their own lives. By the end of the year, that story should be much longer, should include dialogue and details, should have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and should meet several other criteria.
Advanced students may become proficient at the use of a dictionary in second grade for the purposes of looking up an unfamiliar word. Struggling students will not be proficient in this skill: it’ll take them far too long for it to be a worthwhile return on energy at this age. (They’ll still learn the skill, they just won’t be efficient at it). I’ve not yet met the second grader who’s proficient at using a dictionary to find a word that they’re not sure how to spell.
Given these expectations, I have three options.
The first is that, every time a student hits a difficult word in their writing, they stop, raise their hand, and wait for me to come by to tell them how to spell that word. Many of them really REALLY want to take this approach, and it absolutely torpedoes their writing: if I’m in the midst of a conference with a different student on brainstorming ideas or on writing sequentially or on planning a story or whatever, it can be several minutes before I’m free to help them with spelling. Multiply this times my entire class, and you’ll see it’s an unworkable approach.
The second is that they write only using words they know how to spell. This will torpedo their ability to write interesting stories: they can’t describe the butterfly they found in their garden, or the trip to the emergency room when they busted their head open, or the time they visited their grandfather in Arizona. Instead, they can write about the cat and the rat that it sat on. If I’m trying to teach students to value their ability to express themselves via the written word and to do so powerfully and gracefully, this approach is unworkable.
The third approach is the one I take. Within the first week of school, I teach students a mantra: “Spell it the best you can, and move on.” After that lesson, any time they ask me how to spell a word, I repeat the mantra back to them.
This isn’t to say that spelling doesn’t count. I just finished assessing my students on 86 different common spelling patterns, ranging from the sounds of the short vowels in CVC words to the need to double the terminal consonant when appending the -ing suffix to a CVC word. I entered results into a homebrew spreadsheet, and each student now has an individualized spelling curriculum based on the spelling patterns they still need to learn. Students are accountable in their writing for the spelling patterns that they’ve learned. Once a student studies the -ed ending, I’d better not read about how they walkt to the store. Remember in the third paragraph when I mentioned “several other criteria”? Correct spelling of studied patterns is one of those criteria.
When they’ve finished studying the spelling patterns, I’ll start giving them other lists: lists of commonly misspelled words, lists of words misspelled in their own writing, possibly even self-chosen lists of difficult words (this depends on the student and, frankly, on the year–I’m still not sure whether this approach can be effective at this age). Any word that they’ve studied either in spelling or in one of the twice-weekly (on average) phonics lessons is going to be one that I expect them to spell correctly.
But I’m not going to require a second-grader to know how to spell “emergency” before writing about the emergency room. I’m also not going to hand back papers covered in red ink of spelling corrections: there’s absolutely zero evidence that such an approach improves spelling.