The National Spelling Bee Finals are held this week! Hundreds of student spelling champions, ranging from 9 to 15 years old, will travel to Washington, DC to compete in the National Spelling Bee.
Most students won’t win the National Spelling Bee, but most students can learn to spell. They need to see words in print through lots of reading and lots of writing, and they need strategic help from their teachers. The sixth standard of the NCTE/IRA Standards for the English Language Arts states that “students [should] apply [their] knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation)” in their speaking and writing.
In this article in Primary Voices, Sandra Wilde suggested the following:
The Speller’s Bill of Rights
- The right to express yourself in first-draft writing regardless of what words you do and don’t know how to spell.
- The right to do a lot of reading, which is probably the greatest single factor in spelling acquisition.
- The right to actively construct knowledge about the spelling system.
- The right to developmentally appropriate education in spelling.
- The right to learn that spelling does matter.
- The right to know about and have available a lot of ways to come up with spellings (including just knowing how to spell the word).
- The right to learn to proofread.
- The right to have spelling placed in its proper context as a small piece of the writing and language-learning process.
- The right to be valued as a human being regardless of your spelling.
Will you tune into the Spelling Bee?