We are encountering this with DD7 this year. She turns out, to my mortification, to be an atrocious speller -- at least, in her written work. Her spelling tests are nearly perfect, and the ones she misses there are clearly because she mis-heard the word and spelled a different one rather than because she misspelled the correct word. Her papers, and sentences, are riddled with errors, generally of omission but sometimes of her version of phonetic spelling. Once in a while, the teacher corrects something by writing above the word, but most of the things she brings home are raw. I shudder to think what we're going to see hanging on the wall at parent-teacher conferences.
I am NOT a fan of "invented spelling", and I think it's obvious anywhere you go that decades of teachers not correcting spelling has led to a nation of people who can't spell cat without a dictionary -- and don't know how to look it up there, either. The problem with any failed curriculum is that it doesn't take long before the kids it was tried on become the teachers of the next bunch.
I do tell DD the correct spelling of things, and I'm still trying to figure out whether laziness and speed is a large factor in the problem -- sometimes she spells the same word correctly and incorrectly in two different lines. I'm pretty sure that most of the omission errors are because she's in a hurry.
Also of interest -- I was going over her notebook full of "five sentences" writing last night, and saw a note from the teacher saying that she should have a topic sentence, three detail sentences, and a closing sentence. All this time, she's been bringing home the assignment to "write five sentences about x", and I didn't know it meant to write a paragraph, essay-style! So I explained the format to her, and she got it immediately. The teacher's correction note had no effect whatsoever, until it was explained, and then the light bulb turned on!
