Why this teacher says screen time could be making your child a bad speller

Spelling and grammar are often tough lessons to learn at any age but teachers are revealing the most common mistakes kids are making across the board and why screen time could be the problem.

Tiktok teacher Lil Miss Sunshinee admits when it comes to marking papers, teachers have to acquire "the skill of deciphering, translating, interpreting some very interesting spelling".

So much so that she conducted a survey of fellow teachers with Pilot Pen Australia to find some of the most common mistakes kids are making.

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At the top of the list, 'failing to put a capital letter at the start of a sentence' is the most common mistake kids make, according to more than 50 per cent of teachers.

While 'using a full stop' was the second most common mistake recorded by 21 per cent of teachers.

The new data comes ahead of the latest Naplan results being released next month. 

Teachers revealed the two other most common mistakes they've seen from students were writing 'Alot' instead of 'A lot' and 'Definitely misspelled as defiantly."

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"These are very simple and common grammatical and punctuation errors that we teachers see every day," says Lil' Miss Sunshinee, also known as Bree.

And it seems the fellow teachers among her, almost 40,000 followers, agree, with many commenting with their own experiences of common classwork blunders. 

"My kids always forget to do finger spaces, so the words are all together, and I have to chop the sentence into sections," writes Becky.

While Emily said her year six students, "always spelling excited, exited".

But Bree says parents shouldn't be worried if their kids stumble on these errors because "making and correcting mistakes is how kids learn best".  

She suggests parents use it as an opportunity to teach and connect with their kids.

"Parents can help at home by carving out a regular time to read story books with their children and also limiting screen time, which is often where children can pick up bad spelling and punctuation habits, with so many abbreviations and slang words being seen and then copied."

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