Spelling

Kids make me laugh. I put magnetic letters up on one of the file cabinets in my classroom. One of my kids was "spelling" words before school started yesterday. He's one of my best students, academically. He was actually doing pretty well sounding words out, but generally just writing all the names he could come up with. All of a sudden, he said, "Teacher, look, Cheese-Its." Except that wasn't how he'd spelled it. He spelled it "Cheesich." He spelled it the way it sounded to him. That's one of my worst problems as a teacher - the natural speech impediments of six-year-olds. Those were the sounds he heard, not necessarily the sounds that were actually in the word. I had to laugh because he was so excited about what he'd come up with.