A new study has “discovered” what Dr. Montessori wrote about a century ago.
When inventing a spelling, the child is engaged in mental reflection and practice with words, not just memorizing. This strategy strengthens neuronal pathways so as the reader/writer becomes more sophisticated with invented spelling, she or he is developing a repertoire of more and more correctly spelled words at the same time. These words are stored in the word form area of the brain where the child can retrieve them automatically as sight words for reading and eventually as correctly spelled words for writing.
Memorizing a list of correct spellings does not help first-plane children learn how to spell. Correcting their spelling for them doesn’t help them learn how to spell. Letting them spontaneously learn how to spell is how they learn to spell.
Therefore, as a preparatory exercise, we offer to the child an alphabet which will be described below. By choosing the letters of the alphabet and placing them one beside the others, he composes words. His manual work is only that of taking known shapes from a case, and spreading them out on a mat. The word is built up, letter by letter, in correspondence with its component sounds. Since the letters are movable objects, it is easy to correct by displacement the composition which is made. This represents a studied analysis of the word and an excellent means for improving spelling.
It is a real study, an exercise of the intelligence, free from mechanism. It is not mixed up with the interesting exercise of the necessity for producing writing. Hence the intellectual energy devoted to this new interest may be expended without weariness in a surprising amount of work. — Montessori, M. “The Discovery Of The Child” p250, Kalakshetra