“Why spelling mistakes?”- this has been the major query of all parents and teachers of schooling students. Teachers take utmost care by giving students sight words, keywords, making them to memorize the glossary words and giving dictation practice. On the other hand,parents do their routine work: keeping an eye on the given homework and making sure children complete it without any mistake. In spite of that why spelling mistakes?
Hi this is Farhana here. I work in education background past six years as a teacher, trainer, speaker, researcher and counselor. I have taken up a community project from Self-Expression and Leadership Program of Landmark Education. My vision on this project is to Empower Education Unconditionally and my project title is SEEK KNOWLEDGE TILL GRAVEYARD. As a part of the project I have written this article for parents, teachers and students of schooling background on “Intentional Reading”.
This article is intended to take students into the space of connecting themselves in reading by completely looking i.e. reading word by word slowly by looking into each and every letters of the word. The visual channel activates when the child’s eyeballs are fixed into the words, auditory channel activates when the child hears what he reads and kinesthetic channel activates as the child can experience how he reads. The practice on slow, focused and intense reading enables the words to be retained in the student’s mind through their learning styles. This is what I mean by intentional reading. When students develop the habit of intentional reading, they will develop themselves in retaining the spellings of the words. This would master the child’s capacity to retain the spellings of the words they read gradually.
On answering the part of why spelling mistake, we all need to understand the child’s world. Children are driven to read the content wholly, in order to develop conceptual understanding, or read it for the sake of just being told to, or to imprint their reading style among friends,or to read without making a mistake. In these scenarios, it is highly difficult for their mind to capture the letters of the word they read. The impact of unintentional reading habit puts the child into threatful situation where most of them are affected by anxiety, stumble to fix their attention in the particular content, their breathing pattern gets imbalanced and constant confusions in their spelling. Gradually it affects their social relationships and self-esteem. As they are unaware of this process, individually they begin to view themselves as “I cannot write without spelling mistake”. This unconscious pattern makes them to believe that they are unable, sometimes children feel comfortable not correcting their mistakes. Even though when they are being exposed to the phonetic awareness during their early-reading practice, gradually they lose their track of reading phonetically because as they develop,they realize that English is a non-phonetic language.
I invite you all to put Intentional Reading into practice and enjoy seeing your child gradually give out stunning performance of “No spelling mistake”. Encourage children to read whole-heartedly and consistently with determination. This practice would balance their breathing pattern, stabilize their emotions, uplift their esteem, strengthen their memory and ensure their confidence. Children who got the understanding of this reading practice have shown improvement in spelling.
Farhana
Psychological Researcher