Metacognitive awareness and other stuff

I am in a 3rd grade classroom with a variety of reading levels. Each student chooses books that are at their level (just right books). During the first few weeks of school, my master teacher will ask each student individually to come to the back of the room to have a reading conference. During this first conference, she asks different questions about them as readers. One of the questions she asks is what strategies they use when they don't know a word. This is an example of metacognitive awareness. They are applying strategies they learned last year in 2nd grade to this year. After the questionnaire, she has them read to her. She checks to see if they are using the strategies they mentioned earlier in the meeting, among other things. Many of the students I observed, used the chunking strategy. They cover up half/part of of the word with their finger and works from there. It seems to work for most of the students who do this. She meets with them multiple times per month individually and looks back to the page where they told her about their reading habits. She makes sure they are using those reading strategies they told her about.

Another one of the suggestions the book gives also applies to my classroom. During Writer's Workshop time, the students are given a prompt or idea to write about. She wants them to build stamina with their writing and wants them to work on writing continuously for 15 minutes. In order for that to happen, she tells them that if they come to a word they can't spell, to just write it the way they think it is spelled and move on. I think this is a good idea because sometimes students can get so caught up on a word, that they either forget what they were writing about, not write much or become some absorbed in it, that it frustrates them and can discourage them from continuing. Others may just use that as an excuse not to write.

What I find great about phonemic and phonetic awareness is that this can be applied to spelling. At what point during the five stages of word learning do you introduce spelling? In my school district, they start a little bit in kindergarten, but start having tests in 1st grade. Besides writing words several times, is there another way to teach spelling?