March 3, 2026
“I love you no mabr whut.”
What beautiful words one of my school age friends wrote to his mom for Valentine’s day! His mom commented that when he reads he corrects his speech sound errors, but his actual spelling of words is a challenge.
This example highlights two things:
1) recognizing the 5 different stages of spelling development
2) how speech sound errors can impact spelling development
Some of this child’s spelling skills demonstrate skills in the semi-phonetic stage (ages 4-6). In this stage a child is beginning to understand that letters represent sounds which are the basics of phonics. My friend demonstrated he is still partially in this stage when he misspelled “whut” for “what.” He spelled it like it sounded phonetically.
When a child has a severe speech sound disorder where sound substitutions are present, the letter/sound correspondence can be impacted. For the word “matter” he spelled it “mabr”. If it was in the phonetic spelling stage (age 6-8), it may have looked like “matr” or “madr”. Instead, my friend substitutes “t” and “d” with “b” resulting in an incorrect mapping of the sound to letter correspondence.
This idea that a child can read the words correctly but not spell them, highlights again the importance of building the orthographic processor (written word) and the phonological processor (sounds) together. How do we help do this? Use the printed word in sessions, help the child to hear all the sounds in a word slowly, and ask our friends to write words that include the sounds that have weak letter sound correspondences. This will help a child move through the stages of spelling development to become a competent speller who has a strong understanding of letter/sound correspondence, a foundation of understanding patterns and standard rules in spelling.