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 think that the message being sent is that correct spelling only has a place in spelling tests, and when it comes to writing, anything goes.
Also, I don't understand why they are getting such young kids to write so much. It seems developmentally totally inappropriate, and very busyworky.
And why keep students in the dark about correct spelling. That seems cruel. Why make a child's world a more unstable place by intentionally imposing this type of uncertainty.
