During my student teaching last Thursday in a seventh grade English class, I was helping a student work on a personal essay talking about some of his favorite memories. I began to help him brainstorm, and he told me he loved to draw. I naturally asked him what his favorite things to draw were. His response: "I love drawing gray and white sketches of cartoons." I told him that was a great example, and he began to copy his response onto the grocery list of ideas we had started. I watched as he wrote the word gray, and I immediately had a scary I'm not sure how to spell that moment. I let the student leave the spelling as he had it, but I made a mental note to check out the answer. came home and found a website that explains why I was so confused. This website shows the difference in spelling comes from differences in UK and American culture. Words like grey, travelled, and centre are just a few examples of UK spellings that are easily confused with the US forms. As a future English teacher, I immediately started to think of ways to incorporate lessons that help explain to students ways to remember tricky spellings with words like grey/gray. I plan on reading over my student's essay tomorrow, and I plan on making a point to tell him his spelling of the word gray. I am sure he didn't think twice about it when he wrote it, though.
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