Previous research investigations in the area of spelling development have adopted two approaches, the broad approach and the narrow approach. The broad approach suggests that spelling develops in sequential stages whereas the narrow approach focuses on individual linguistic patterns. However, research findings have revealed that children’s spellings do not exhibit errors pertaining to specifically one stage or reflecting one linguistic element, yet a research void exists in resolving how these two approaches might intermix. This study examined the spelling errors of typically developing children in first through fourth grades (N = 400) to determine the quantitative and qualitative differences in misspellings among grade levels. Each grade level had an equal representation of children (N = 100) and male and female participants. The spelling errors were extracted from two writing samples completed by the children, a narrative and expository sample. In an attempt to combine the broad and narrow approaches, a coding system was designed to evaluate the linguistic category (phonological, orthographic, morphological) and specific features (letter name spelling, vowel error, digraph, etc.) of the spelling errors. The findings revealed a significant interaction between grade level and error type for phonologically-based spelling errors (1 st graders made more errors than 2nd and 4th graders) and a greater number of morphological errors was noted in 4 th vs. 2nd grade. No significant effects were noted for writing genre or gender. Analysis of performance patterns for specific linguistic category errors within and across grade levels revealed that all four grade levels committed the most phonological errors in the PSE (phonological – silent /e/) and PSON (phonological – sonorant clusters) categories. The OLN (orthographic – letter name) and ODI (orthographic – digraph) errors also occurred frequently in all four grades with first graders demonstrating significantly more occurrences of the OLN than ODI error. Morphological findings revealed that first graders made significantly more MINF (morphological – inflection) than MHOM (morphological – homonym) errors and all four grades had significantly more MINF than MCON (morphological – contraction) errors. A qualitative analysis regarding the most frequently misspelled words and most frequently encountered codes was also performed. The clinical and educational implications of these findings are discussed.