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better best guess spelling

Posted on May 13, 2010 by thirdstoryies
For the longest time E refused to write. She would start to put her thoughts down on paper, but when the sounds and the letters didn’t arrange themselves in a way that resembled the words that she knew them to be she’d get very frustrated and stop. She also wasn’t as quick with the pen as she was with the ideas. And a dictionary slowed her down that much more.
Midway through kindergarten, her teacher finally brought her around to the world of writing. “Best guess spelling” became a phrase we heard on a daily basis. If she started to complain about not knowing how to spell a word we would encourage her to use her best guess spelling and the block would end and the ink would flow. Some of those early stories were so hard to decipher. Luckily most were accompanied with little post-it notes with translations. Her daily calendar journal documented most of her days as “Grat!”, Dad was most often described as “cuddaley” and my favorite best guess was always the various versions of “speshul”.
Slowly the written vocabulary is catching up with the spoken one, and one by one those words come home in sentences and paragraphs and poems spelled correctly. I’m excited about her progress, but a little sad to see the “greats” and the “cuddlies” and the “specials” in their places. Even those contractions and words like “to” and “two” and “too”, and “there” and “their” and “they’re” are more often than not used in the correct application. Last Friday she pulled out her Mother’s Day card that was just too exciting to wait until Sunday. The words were typed with capital and lower case letters, and the whole poem looked so polished. She beamed as I read it.
My mom
My mom is as beautiful as a queen and as sweet as surup.
Your smile is bright and as cheerful as a clown.
My favorite part? Of course, the surup.

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