• These spelling are not habit forming. As children learn more about spelling rules, fewer temporary spellings will appear.
• Nor are these spellings due to laziness. In fact, it takes a lot of thinking to come up with these spellings!

As beginning writers learn what the letters are and how to form them they usually ask how words are spelled. At this point, we spell the word for them. However, once students have made the connection between the letters and their sounds, they can make a fairly accurate attempt at spelling on their own. Now when children ask how to spell a word, our response is, "What do you hear when I say your word slowly?" When a child comes to us with his/her writing, we have him/her read it to us. (This saves embarrassment for both of us if we can't figure out what s/he's written!)

By the time a child is about 7 or 8, s/he is probably ready for more formal spelling. Traditionally, spelling has been taught using graded spelling lists based on either word frequency or how complex the phonics were. Kinney students have spelling lists, but they address their individual needs. The words on the list are taken from each child's writing and from the top 100 or 200 most commonly used words.

We start the week with a pretest, to see which words s/he is really going to have to think about for the next 5 days. Then each day, students work with these words in some way, perhaps alphabetizing them, using them in sentences, adding the number of vowels to the number of consonants in each word, etc. By Friday, s/he is ready for the post test which tells us which words they should be able to use correctly. Any misspelled words go onto next week's list.