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A Word About Inventive Spelling
I never understood why it was taught this way and asked it not to be done.
It was the 2005–06 school year and my middle son was in kindergarten. His older brother was in 5th grade and his younger brother was 3 years old, at home with me.
Immediately, I noticed some differences between how kindergarten was taught in 2000 and then in 2005. My boys had two different teachers, both talented for handling that age group, and I was the room mother for both. This weekly engagement as a volunteer gave me a front-row seat in the classroom for an hour or two. I enjoyed both classrooms. Both used centers to get work done and I helped at the centers, doing what each teacher asked of me. Most of my duties centered around language arts.
But by the time spring arrived in 2006, I noted an important difference in the classes in the way reading and spelling were taught. I noticed that my middle son’s teacher was using what was referred to then as inventive spelling.
This meant that if they didn’t know how to spell a word, they could write it by sounding it out. Okay. Great. But, there was very little phonics instruction for entire words. As kindergarteners, they were still working on individual letter sounds and pairs of letter sounds, such as ch, sh, tr, etc.
