My 5-year-old is bopping merrily along in the 1st grade (skipped K). He's been placed into the highest reading group and exceeded all expectations for math (he should probably be in 2nd grade math but he still can't write 4 or 9 the right way).
But he's having a real personal struggle with the expectation that he should write down words that he knows are spelled incorrectly. He doesn't care if the phonics of a bad word make sense--if he KNOWS it's spelled wrong, he won't write it. Mind, he knows plenty of words that he can usually come up with a synonym that he can spell, but this refusal to engage in the writing of incorrect-but-phonetic words is driving his 1st grade teacher batty.
To be honest, I kind of just wish she'd let it be, because the duration of time during which it's treated as ok to misspell a lot of words is very finite.
