ever had a child who can't spell?

Happens all the time. If you’ve gotten consonants this soon, you are doing well. Vowels are often taught later in reading and therefore are expressed later. No, don’t quit while you’re ahead! Just as he’s starting to do something right, even if he canb’t master every single detail in six months, is not the time to give up and use a method that is a known failure.
A company called Phonovisual puts out some *excellent* charts (buy the package of small ones — it’s cheap and other kids will use them too) for reference of consonant and vowel sounds. Put the charts in plastic protectors, tape one copy to the desk for reference and put another in his binder, etc.
Phonovisual also put out some good workbooks, one on consonants, one on vowels, and one advanced/review. I don’t use them as much as some others because they are repetitive, but repetition is exactly what you need for a slow learner. I would get *both* “Road to Power and Confidence” books, and I would do one page of each per day — review and reinforce consonants, and learn vowels. In one month he would be spelling better, and in two to three months would have much of the system mastered. Go to the website at phonovisual.com — they have a good outline there. Order the books; the company is not fast, but tried and true.

short and sweet, teach him how to segment or he will continue to memorize words to read, if he cannot spell, HE CANNOT segment

if ya cannot segment, you never learn the code,

he has to be able to pull those sounds apart, ALL by himself,

ask him, to give you the sounds in a word

draw three lines across a white board, run your finger under the lines as you say a CVC word such as top

make sure finger corresponds with the line and the sound you are saying,

DO not i repeat do not segment it for him

then put your finger on top of the first line and ask

use these exact words

“what sound do you hear RIGHT here”

don’t say first sound, middle sound or last sound

cuz if he cannot segment, there is only one sound and that is the whole word

get busy, fix his segmenting now

libby

I have given up on spelling. My daughter, diagnosed specific language processing deficit, has been remediated and is reading close to or at grade level. She has always been verbal and has a terrific vocabulary. Over time writing production has improved but the spelling is another story. She spells phonetically which in the English language is not possible. I have accomodations in place to seperate the grading of content from spelling.

She can memorize for a spelling test -its in writing production that’s the problem. The problem is definately a visual language processing thing-she is much improved after vision therapy but not the spelling.

An example would be scweez for squeeze. sirees for series.

Actually a vocabulary workbook called Wordly Wise that has a section on morphology in each lesson seems to helping a bit. Anyone familiar with this series? Any other ideas?

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We continue to struggle for something that he has written that I can read. I am interested in the suggestions above. But, since time has moved on we are also focusing on learning to use speech recognition. Dragon is going well and down the road with Kurzweil, we’ll scan worksheets in and dictate the answers. But then maybe they don’t have worksheets in college. I’ll have another set of demands to help him meet. So for now Assistive Technology is a lot of my focus.

Since earobics seemed to help you might look into whether your district has Fast ForWord. It is very intensive phonological work and would give him the repetition that might help to improve the processing issues.

I think it is what the LMB people called symbol imagery. If you go to their website they have it explained on there. My son could not keep the picture of the symbols in his head. I really believe the LMB people are right about this particular issue. Seeing stars attempts to teach children to see the symbols in their head. It is different than VV which teaches people to visualize concepts. My son never had any problem visualizing concepts, it was just the letters and numbers.
My son could not learn to do this with my very uneducated attempts at seeing stars. He could do it a little but it just wasn’t sticking.

After doing vision therapy he has started to learn to do this.
Our optometrist does alot of exercises that promote visualization. I don’t think they all do this.

There is one exercise in particular that helped alot but you need special pencils with the alphabet on them so I won’t go into the details unless someone knows where you would find pencils like this.

What about pencils with letters “stickied” (there are non-stick glue sticks sort of like a wax) to them.

The letters could be created on the computer by writing them
l
i
n
e
r
a
l
l
y

and then, cut out and stuck onto a pencil.
Would this work?

Yes, Laura you are so smart.

The letters should be A-Z on one pencil the Z-A on the other.

It doesn’t matter which but hold one at arms length and one as close as possible but not so close that they can’t see the letters.

Then spell the word ‘sadly’ say and find ‘s’ on the near pencil, say and find ‘a’ on the far pencil, say and find ‘d’ on the near etc etc

I think he was forced to hold the picture of the word in his head because he had other things to concentrate on such as finding the letter and adjusting his focus from near to far.

I think it promoted spelling as a whole brain activity.

Every word he has done this way has stuck like glue in his mind even months later.

The child holds the pencils.

Sequential Spelling (http://www.avko.org) may be helpful. This is my all-time favorite spelling program for very bad spellers. It seems to work when nothing else does. It takes about 60 lessons before you start noticing improvements in daily writing.

Language! Roots (from EPS or Sopris West, can’t remember) works on morphology. I think it would be difficult for a parent to do without training, but you might want to look for a tutor who uses it.

If your daughter doesn’t mind worksheets, Megawords might be helpful (again, EPS or Sopris West).

I also very much like Vocabulary Vine, which teaches Greek and Latin roots in an easy, sequenced approach with built-in spiral review. I’m not sure this would do as much for spelling as it does for vocabulary, though.

Nancy

Liste nto Libby and teach him to segment. It is easy, fast and will make an amazing difference. all of the programs in the world and all of the money won’t help him as much as teaching him how to segment.
Nan

Hi mmm,

You wrote: “She spells phonetically which in the English language is not possible.”

Try purchasing the book Reading Reflex and use it to make sure you understand segmenting (per libby’s post) and then pay careful attention to the many ways that various sounds are spelled.

You see, the English language IS phonetic, but it’s a messy sort of phonics. We have many spellings for the same sound. Take the /z/ sound for instance…five ways at least…z, zip; ze, squeeze; zz, buzz; s, has; se, choose.

There are only a relatively few words that are not spelled completely phonetically with common representations for each sound. The problem is that we represent sounds so many ways…from 2 to 9 or even 10 ways. Think about the /ay/ sound: day, paper, rain, weigh, vein, great, they, straight, Mae, take, and probably a couple more yet.

Use Reading Reflex to expose your daughter to the various ways to spells sounds (after you’ve made sure she can segment) and see if she doesn’t start to notice spellings more in print.

Squeeze could have been spelled scweez (or skweez or squeaze or squease or skweze or any of probably a dozen or more ways.) Your daughter needs to learn that she will gradually become a better speller if she notices these differences and if she reads enough so that some of the spellings she uses look “funny” to her. Then she’s on her way. We learn to spell only one way, by reading.

Rod

Well, scweez makes perfect sense. So she is halfway there. The problem now is that many sounds in English, especially vowels, have variant ways of spelling. So if you always write long e as ee, and so on, then you will get the wrong choice more than the right. What she needs to do is to make the final step, to know the vowel sound and to know the four or five expressions of it, e_e, ee, ea, -e, ei, and then to remember *which* is in a particular word.
Same but less variability (usually one or two choices) in consonants — c or k, qu = kw, z or s + vowel.

Spelling lists are worse than useless for this. They tend to harp on irregularities when what you need is regularity first; they tend to harp on difficult words when you need to get a handle on the common ones; and they are taught as memorization when you need to get thinking skills involved.

I have not used Avko but have heard good things about it. Linda’s visual activity with the two pencils is a way to get the brain on task — away from mindless repetiton and actually consciously looking at/visualizing a word.

I tend to work step by step by dragging step through a very good series of workbooks that teach phonics but also get into language patterns and syllables and basic morphology, and this also slowly but steadily shows greatly improved results in spelling. In French I have a wonderful new phonics-based reading series that teaches all the French phonetic patterns over 53 lessons, and I’m getting the same slow but steady language and spelling improvements there. With two Grade 5 and 6 students who were lost in a swamp in French spelling, I have gone back to classic grammar and morphology (Conjugating verbs, studying the seven parts of speech, looking at patterns of silent letters, past and present and future, writing paragraphs using specific patterns and then correcting them together — all the classics) and am gradually getting improvement there, too.

The message seems to be: (a) it *is* doable. All of my present students (Grades 2 to 6 at the moment) are spelling notably better, and both parents and teachers have made positive comments to this effect. (b) It’s *slow*. The advice to stick to sixty or more lessons in Avko is appropriate. Tell yourself patience is a virtue, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you are *investing* this year or two of work in your child’s future. I see my students once or twice a week, and the spelling improvements show up after one to three months; and that’s improvements, not the whole ball of wax yet. (c) It’s not mass of work that counts, but conscious concentration. Ten minutes a day, or three twenty-minute sesssions a week, with the mind fully involved in the work, are far more valuable than hours and hours reciting spelling lists. (d) Involve higher-order thinking skills, morphology, grammar, history of language (Greek and Latin roots, French words, etc.), homophones (same sound like sea - see) and homographs (same spelling, different sounds like read present, read past), advanced levels of phonics — most people quit phonics far too soon, just as they are beginning to succeed. (e) Varied activities, phonics books, other phonics books, reading, grammar, writing sentences, critiquing paragraphs, visualizing words — are all useful, and help prevent boredom and wasted time.

Thanks for all the help. Segmenting is part of the phonological awareness activities that I’ve done, but it looks like he needs to do more of it. He does learn by repetition! I’ll do more of that and I will also print the vowel chart from phonovisual. On the earobics I’ll let him to the Rap a Tap Tap for segmenting. So I won’t give up just yet. Thanks, everyone!

.

I’d recommend the workbooks as well as the charts from phonovisual — the workbooks help *give* that necessary repetition, saving you a lot of unnecessary work and giving more variety in the exercises.

Also please see my post above where I go into what is working for my students.

Yes, I have ordered the workbooks as well : )

Linda, this is an interesting excercise…

I would like to add yet another issue- which I think you and others already talked about- integration.

My son can hold an image of a word in his mind- he can do it so well that he can spell either way- from first to last letter or from last to first- which surely tells you he can see the word (he will also comment that the letters are in different colors).

However, when writing he will make mistakes- omissions, or letters in wrong order or “their” in place of “there”. I still do not know whether this is an attention problem or integration problem because he can correct these mistakes when I point them to him, but he just “does not see them” when writing.

Ewa,

That is my son. I told the doctor that my son can spell, write neatly, can put together a nice essay when someone else does the spelling and writing but left to his own devices can not write a paragraph on his own with proper spelling or punctuation.

He can’t put it all together, still. His spelling has gotten better when he is asked to just write a series of sentences. It is more an issue when he is asked to write an essay that requires a bit more thought that everything seems to fall apart. The demands are just too high and all systems just seem to fail.

When I explained this to the doctor he gave me a book called, “Integrating Mind Brain and Body.” The exercises seem very simple. One is that he has to lay on the floor, open his arms and legs while breathing in through his nose out through his mouth. He has to focus on a point on the ceiling and think arms and legs. He also has to raise everything slowly and in unison.

I thought this would be a cinch. He finds them EXTREMELY difficult. The exercises are supposed to promote integration of the mind and body. Whenever he finds something difficult I have found that he can master it and usually an improvement in some aspect of learning coincides with the mastery of the exercise. That is just how vision therapy has gone for us.

Beth thinks these exercises are similar to neuronet and brain gym. If you want the book you can try contacting the Rowley Eye Clinic at (425) 483-8000.

Etta Rowley is the author.

Hi,
Yes, many of the students I work with have spelling difficulties. Most largely due to the “low 70s” ability (per WISC), like the student you describe.
The difference in the sounds of vowels is very difficult for them (typically).

I have found that providing visual ‘clue words’ with the letters (all letters, not just the vowels) is very beneficial to students. In fact, one student with many issues, full scale score is ‘high 60s,’ CP, family problems, learned to recognize her alphabet and provide the sounds for letters with the use of cards containing the letter Aa, and picture of an apple, Bb, and pic of a balloon, etc.. We practiced saying, or singing A, apple, /a/, B, balloon, /b/, etc.. until she knew them all. The students enjoy practicing, particularly when they see that they can be successful.

I used a sight word program, PCI, purchased from one of the catalogs we receive several times a year, maybe Bright Ideas. The PCI program introduces 4 words each week with a poem, each word has a picture that is used to represent the word (from within the context of the poem), and several worksheets. The 4 words are practiced over and over on worksheets using close procedure, crossword puzzles, fill in the missing letter, letter scramble, writing practice and more. I wasn’t sold on this at first, but the students like it. After a few weeks of doing the same types of activities for each new group of 4 words, they know how to do the work, know what is expected of them and they feel successful with the assignment! Working independently, while in the general education classroom, they don’t often feel success. One of my lowest ability (WISC) students has a very good visual memory, particularly for these words. He is very happy when he hears me say to another student, “Go ask Nick, he will remember, I cannot think of that word.” ANYWAY, THE REALLY REMARKABLE THING THAT HAPPENED WITH THE SIGHT WORDS IS that after she knew about 40-70 sight words, she began to use the decoding strategies on these sight words, in sort of a test. Then, she went on to decoding new words, and sound spelling unknown words!! The time frame was K, 1, and half of second, for a little girl who couldn’t hold a pencil to reading and writing unknown words, it made my year!
Sorry,much more information than you asked for.
JanMarie

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Yes, my child also has huge problems with vowels and pictures help a lot.

Segmenting is still an issue. Oral segmenting using Earobics is better now.

Segmenting using letters is still hard. First letter is perfect. Last letter is okay, but when he thinks about the middle letter, he forgets the last letter too.

His blending is still not fluent. He still says the letters individually before he can blend using his fingers. However, this is so much better than 4 months ago when he would say “/c/-/a/-/t/ sit”!

Sight words is easy for him, but he subvocalizes saying each letter before he can say the word. Sometimes I marvel at how he can recognize the word when he says the letter name of each word. Ex: “/t/ /h/ /e/ the”. Maybe saying the letter name reinforces the picture in his mind. I have always discouraged him from saying the letter name. I make sure that he focuses on the sounds.

I think that he just needs more time with blending and segmenting and learning the sounds of the vowels. He has come a long way. More repetition maybe.

The Phonovisual workbooks and chart provide a *consistent* picture code for each sound. The small charts are nice because you can cover the teo with plastic, tape them to the top of the desk, and point at the code picture each time he misses that sound. I find the workbooks a bit repetitive for most students, but they’re exactly what you need in this situation. The consistency is good for a start — you can get into variety later.

The letter name system — hmmm, is he getting help at home and/or from another teacher, well-meaning and hard-working people but poorly versed in phonics? You could speak to mom and give her a copy of the phonovisual charts for home use too.

I have typed up some stuff about teaching blending — if you are interested, please just email me and remind me what you’re looking for.

Hello, Where is Phonovisual available for purchase? Website? Thank you

Victoria told me about that website.

Linda,

thanks- will look for that book.

Some time passed, but just wanted to tell you that I will start BRAIN GYM with my son - just got in touch with a provider. Iw ill do this with him, but I would like somebody “outside” of home to be the primary “provider” I know my son will respond better.

Curious to see what will happen. We are aslo finally scheduled to see OD- I am positive my son has visula issue- although some seem to be improving recently.

Ewa

I use an approach called Synthesizing Phonics. It’s a brain based, multi-sensory, synthesized approach to phonics that can be taught both individually and in a group. I have used it with 7 year olds through 5th grade. You can learn more about it from Reading Connections Inc. which is a clinic in Green Bay, WI. The students that I used it with this year made excellent progress and couldn’t wait to get their lists of words each week (especially the 4th graders.) It’s both a reading and spelling approach.

Believe it or not, I have seen an improvement since my daughter began keyboarding. It is a kinesthetic thing. She remembers the movements of her fingers when she spells some words (common words spelled a lot is most improvement). It’s much like the person who will “air dial” when repeating a telephone number - same process.

Just a thought.