My DD8 aces her spelling tests with very little effort, but then misspells easy words when she sits down to write. This is, I am sure, because her school encouraged "inventive spelling" at the very beginning, and she's still falling back on that habit, due to laziness.
In defense of your daughter, I wouldn't place this as laziness. One thing I've learned in my parenting & spelling adventure in the last few years, is that the brain needs for composing a message and the brain needs for constructing the spelling come from different parts of the brain. If one part of the brain is taxed or if it's too hard for her to switch gears repeatedly, then she can choose to compose the message or spell it right. Slow switching was described to me as my daugther's issue. I see "too taxed to do anything else" as my son's related issues.
We've noticed around here that starting in 2nd grade, and more intensely in 3rd, the kids are taught to go back and identify which words are wrong, and see if they can fix them then. This then lets the kid focus on spelling as a distinct step.
I am not a natural speller. I think it's important to spell accurately without spell check. My lecture hall's chalk board is decidedly lacking in that regard, but also because it increases the number of errors I need to find in my writing. Either autocorrect introduces errors (the typo 'i t' almost always gets autocorrected to "I") that I then have to find, or I have more opportunities to miss an error in my writing.
I've learned to spell, however, though the old-style MS Word spell check. The spell checker flags it, then I need to find it off a list of suggestions. When I started doing that, I'd often also need a dictionary, since my initial spelling was too far off. I can now almost exclusively just fix the spelling for everything underlined in red. My spelling continues to improve, however, decades after leaving school.
