Dramatic and thought-provoking.

Inventive Spelling

It is called “invented spelling” or “inventive spelling,” and many teachers encourage it in the early grades. It’s not because they’ve given up teaching children to spell, but because of a general shift in understanding about how children learn.

When children create their own spellings for words they do not know how to spell correctly they’re using invented spelling. They use what they know about letters, sounds and spelling patterns to spell the word as well as they can.

Written in standard spelling, the above excerpt from a first-grader’s story would say: “There once was two flowers. One was pink and the other was purple. They did not like each other because they were different colors. One day they had a fight.”

Commentary on Inventive Math (with a little tung in chek tossed in): More