teaching.mrstacey.org.uk

I have always had bad spelling. I could always remember enough of my spellings in spelling tests at school to average around 7/10, but they’ve often not transfered to my long term memory. The only ‘difficult’ word I can always spell correctly is ‘necessary’ because my brilliant GCSE English teacher had posters with mnemonics on them and ‘Never eat cake, eat salad sandwiches and remain young’ just stuck with me for some reason. 

To make matters worse, I also write pretty quickly, with the thought more important than the spelling of the words, and to top all that I’m lousy at proofing my own work – I read what I meant to type, rather than what I actually typed. 

Although I regularly use a spell checker I often find it’s the same words that get underlined in red every time. For whatever reason I just click and change, and don’t take in the correction. However, I’ve noticed a real change in that since I’ve started using Google Docs. Words that aren’t in my browsers dictionary still get underlined, but right clicking won’t do anything. I’ve got to wait, go up to switch the spell checker on, wait for the word to go yellow, then right click and then correct. The result is that I’ve actually started paying more attention now to what the spelling should be, and as a result, I’m making less mistakes. By making something less easy, more learning takes place. 

Sometimes quicker may not always be better