Recently, I have noticed that my students have been looking at their own writing and circling mistakes on their own before they come back to ask me if they can use the Franklin Speller. I am excited the majority of the class is doing this on a regular basis. There are still a few students who ask me how to spell a word, and again I ask them how they think it's spelled. 99% of the time they are correct.
Up until now, I have been discouraging students from telling their classmates how to spell words because I want each learner to grow to be independent in this area. However, due to the social nature of human beings, I'm beginning to think that I should teach all of my students a couple tips to help those who ask them how to spell a word. For example, they could simply ask, "How do you think you spell it?" If that doesn't work, I could tell students about a strategy I use. If a student has to go to the next step to get help, I think of a word that rhymes with the sound they are struggling with. For example, if the word is "boat", I ask them if they know how to spell "coat" or "goat". If they do, I ask them to spell one of the words. Then I tell them the last three letters are spelled the same. It seems like teaching my students strategies for teaching others would be a more effective solution than telling students not to talk about how to spell words at all. It would also help the students who take on the teaching role by giving them confidence and encouraging them to develop their own thinking skills by coming up with new strategies for teaching spelling to someone else. Who knows? They may think of ideas that have never even crossed my mind, but help the student speller learn how to spell the word.
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