Spelling Mistakes: Should I Correct Them Immediately?

by Marie Rippel

It’s another one of our most frequently asked questions.

Should I correct my child’s spelling mistakes right away?

This is actually a great question that is often raised by concerned moms and dads in relation to spelling dictation exercises.

After all, correcting your child’s errors right away seems like it should always be the right thing to do, doesn’t it?

In fact, one school of thought sometimes promoted is that the picture of an incorrectly spelled word should never get imprinted on your child’s mind.

The idea is that if a child starts to write a wrong letter, the error should be corrected right away so that the child never sees or writes a word incorrectly.

But here’s why correcting your child’s spelling errors too quickly isn’t ideal.

When your child makes a mistake, he already thinks he’s writing the correct answer, which means he already has the incorrect spelling in his mind. Quickly telling him what he did wrong and moving on may not accomplish the learning you hope it will.

And worse, rushing to correct your child’s spelling undermines his judgment.

You want your child to learn to trust his own ability to identify and correct mistakes, but when you correct your child prematurely, he instead learns to doubt his own judgment. He learns that there’s no need to internalize a rule, pattern, or other spelling strategy because he can rely on outside correction.

This is exactly the opposite of what we want the student to do in the All About Spelling program.

So if correcting your child’s errors immediately isn’t the solution, what is?

Your goal is to help your child learn how to read and spell proficiently, and errors are part of the learning process. If you’re tempted to correct too quickly, just remember that the misspelling is not left there for long; the student doesreceive help correcting it soon after he has written the sentence.

For example, perhaps your child left out a sound or added an extra one, or perhaps he didn’t apply a rule, made a visual error, or forgot to think through syllables or root words. The AAS lessons encourage you to talk through why the word was misspelled, so the correct spelling will then make more sense to the student than if you simply correct him without explanation. He’ll also be better equipped to spell the word correctly in the future.

To further help the student with a difficult word, AAS instructs you to leave the offending word in the student’s daily spelling review box until the student can spell it quickly and easily. This review method allows ample opportunity for the correct spelling pattern to be ingrained in your student’s mind.

It’s also important to give your child a chance to think through difficult words and self-correct.

When you give your child the opportunity to recognize and correct his own errors, you are able to see more clearly what your child actually knows and understands. You may think he has mastered a rule or pattern, but when you observe that he isn’t able to correct an error that uses a particular pattern, a gap in his understanding is revealed.

And if we just give them the chance, kids can often identify and correct their own mistakes, which does much more to help them master the correct spelling for the next time they encounter that word or pattern.

In fact, being corrected for something you know but didn’t have a chance to fix on your own can be pretty annoying, even for adults. It’s no different for kids. It’s much more satisfying for a child to fix his own mistakes without having to be corrected.

In All About Spelling, we provide a logical strategy to help you and your student cope with difficult words.

1. Ask the student to carefully read exactly what he has written down.
   Often the student will see his own error.
2. Take a look at the cause of the spelling mistake.
   Does the child pronounce the word incorrectly?
   Is he unclear on the particular concept or rule?
   Do you need to re-teach something?
   Did he segment the word correctly? If you need to review a phonogram or a rule, now is the time to do it.
3. Have the student spell the word again, first with the letter tiles and then on paper.
   Customizing your student’s instruction in this way will help him grow in spelling ability more quickly.

Remember: the manner in which you correct mistakes can have a lasting impact on your student’s progress!

Are you tempted to correct your student’s spelling errors too quickly? Let us know how you handle errors in the comments below.

Photographs by Rachel Neumann