And Now, Some Help On Speling Errors In Spelling Program Distributed By School District

Can you spell irony?

Teachers spotted several misspellings in a new fourth-grade spelling program used this year in the Spokane School District.

The mistakes in word lists in a teachers’ guide will be corrected before September, said district curriculum coordinator Fran Mester.

In most classrooms, teachers discovered the errors before they taught the material, Mester said.

Teachers realized the district-produced lists were new. The guide was marked “draft.”

“It wasn’t that it necessarily went to kids in this manner,” Mester said. “This is a draft so teachers were not taking it as gospel.”

Low test scores in spelling have plagued the district and the state for years. Most recently, Spokane fourth-graders scored in the 36th percentile in spelling, meaning that 64 percent of the nation’s fourth-graders scored higher.

The new spelling program is meant to raise those scores by stressing more difficult words, phonics and weekly word lists.

The errors included:

“seperately” instead of the correct “separately”

“leary” instead of the preferred spelling “leery”

“weight” and “way” listed as homonyms

“sleight” and “slate” listed as homonyms

“hear’s” listed as a contraction.

“misled” misspelled in the following sentence for dictation:

“The strange man mislead the children and tricked them.”

Mester blamed the errors on quick proofreading.

A committee of Spokane teachers wrote the material to accompany a purchased program called Daily Oral Language Plus, which emphasizes capitalization and punctuation, but does not contain enough spelling lessons.

Last spring, the district reported that schools using the program in third grade scored significantly higher than schools not using it.

Now used in third and fourth grades, the new program will be expanded to fifth grade next year.

Teachers will be encouraged to proofread the fifth-grade material for errors, Mester said.

Misspellings can be found in textbooks from national publishers too, she said.

“In reviewing ninth-grade social studies textbooks, one teacher found four misspellings,” she said. That textbook was not selected by the district.

, DataTimes