The 'logographic' stage (age 5 or 6)

Beginning spellers of about age 5 or 6 typically learn a core vocabulary (often including their first name and some other words important to them, and some high-frequency words) using a purely non-phonic, 'rote-learning' strategy - for them putting a word down on paper is simply a matter of writing the letters in the sequence they know, and they have no strategy for using elements of those words to write new ones. As a result, their attempts to write new words may consist of strings of letters which bear little or no relation to the target words.

Error patterns characteristic of this stage:

• Main categories: Many omissions and phoneme substitutions (eg 'bair' for 'bear'), few insertions (eg 'horshe' for 'horse') or transpositions ('dialy' for 'daily'), no grapheme substitutions (ie 'rayDo' for 'radio')
• Subordinate categories: letter-name errors, letter confusions (eg mixing up 'b' and 'd')

Most children grow out of this stage, but if their spelling continues to have little resemblance to real words they will need intensive re-teaching of the sounds of letters and of the various ways some common sounds can be spelt (e.g. the /i:/ phoneme in scene, feel, leaf).