Make-up words versus correct spelling

I am a new teacher and a student that had simillar problems in school and was diagnosed with an LD in the first grade. I always read at above grade level but always failed when it came to spelling tests. What I find interesting in this case is that your dd is bilingual. Many bilingual students have simmular problems, either with speaking or writting in their second language. This had might be an avanue to look further into. Be thankful that she is so interested in learning, perhaps she needs reinforcement on the building blocks of spelling such as the the common rules. As a new teacher I don’t have a great deal on insight on this topic but I hope this helps. I am very interested on what other educators may have to say about this topic.

Chad

Is the purpose of the writing to express ideas? If that is the case then the spelling is not the primary focus and the child needs to understand that is the reason for the made up words. (which I don’t really understand what that is). Many schools employ the six trait model for writing and conventions (spelling/punctuation) is only one are to be considered. That may be the reason.

Your dd sounds mature enough for you to introduce her to the concepts of first drafts, editing, and final versions. I have my kids write on every other line for first drafts and encourage them to write fairly quickly without worrying too much about spelling, punctuation, etc.. Once finished, they can go back over what they have written and line our mistakes and insert corrections. They can labor all they want on the editing until they are satisfied. This is year your daughter can try to fulfill her aspirations for perfect spelling. Once edited, the draft can be copied into a final neat and well-spelled version. I like this approach because it allows for the free flow of creativity, while not de-emphasizing the need for correct spelling and punctuation in the end product. It also prepares them for later on where drafting and editing are a fact of life.

I disagree strongly with omitting punctuation; punctuation is part of your sentence and expresses pauses, end of thoughts, questions, etc. Certainly it can be refined in a final draft, but teaching a child to leave it out deliberately is counter-productive.

I also had a gifted daughter, and it is very common for writing skill to be behind mental ability. It will come. Tell her to be patient with herself.

If your daughter is really a good reader and if it is *her* wish to spell correctly, then she is ready to learn and it would be a shame to stifle her desire. The teacher is correct that at *this* stage the majority of children do not need to be stalled in their writing by spelling issues; Grade 3 and 4 are enough to get to standard spelling; but if your daughter is already reading at that level, it is reasonable for her to want to advance her spelling too.

But this one is easy to solve. Just go to a good English-language bookstore, or to Amazon.com, and get her a good junior-level dictionary. Get two copies, one for home and one for her desk at school. Teach her how to look up words alphabetically, not just the first letter but then the second and the third. You want a junior dictionary with about 1000 to 3000 words, enough to cover almost all of her normal speech but not so many and not such fine print that she couldn’t find things. In a short while she will be able to use it independently and both she and the teacher will be happy. She will also read it for interest and improve her vocabulary.

My dd does have the concept of a dictionary. The problem, as reported by her teacher, is that she spends so much time looking up the word list (a sort of her class’s dictionary) for correct spelling that she finds writing a tiring task. As a matter of fact, my dd hates the “newsday” (that is the writing day) to the extent that she does not want to go to school on that day consistently.
Besides, my dd also has this idea that she is very bad at writing and she hates it! The other day after I sent to her teacher the story my dd made up (I typed it up for her), my dd was so upset after school that she cried for 10 minutes. She also made me call her teacher to make sure that she wouldn’t read the story to her class. (It is a story about 200 words.)
I suppose I’ll try with the idea of a draft — as that might help her to accept just putting her ideas down first rather than spend too much time worrying about spelling.

Helan

I have a gifted LD daughter (gifted perf/averge verbal). She is currently in 4th grade. “approximately” would be spelled “aprozematly”). “Want” is almost always “whant”. Frequently misspells “:easy” for “esy” or “ese” Sounded out and spelled correctly “scratched” the other day (YAH!)

She has “global” LDs - in fact, most people are astounded by her abilities - all things considered.

Having said all that, at this stage, do I basically “give up” on her being a good speller? She has a lexile score of 1021 (which I believe is overinflated and Her teacher does not.) Struggles greatly with pen and pencil (slow, can’t copy from the board, etc.) Yet uses technology well and that is her “compensation” tool. (BTW, I’m the only speller in the family - including my non-LD son)

I guess what I’m asking is WHEN do you just say, “Okay, she’ll never be a great speller” and move on (Kind of like my parents did with me in Math). I made C’s in math and A’s in all other subjects. Their decision was “You’ll never be more than average in Math and that’s okay”.

Where do you draw the line of pushing too much - especially when a child is working very hard?

I’m not Victoria but face the same issue with my son. My nonLD daughter is not a great speller either. My goal is to get my son to the point that he can use spell checker!!! In other words, that his spelling is not so far off the spell checker won’t correct it!

I told my daughter the same thing. Now 12, her spelling has really improved with use of spell checkers. She will never be great (but then my husband is the only strong speller in the family).

We have at least as far to go with our son as you do with your daughter. I’m going to try AVKO spelling with him this summer because it is efficient. I tried it two years ago but he couldn’t read well enough to use it. I really don’t expect him to be a good speller but I can’t even read his writing most of the time now!!

Beth

I was writing too fast on the previous post and made a number of typos. I wrote “don’t worry too much about spelling, punctuation etc.” I actually did not mean necessarily to tell the child don’t worry about these things. When I do this with my dd, I actually never tell her don’t worry about spelling because in her case, bad spelling doesn’t bother her in the least. (It just drives me crazy.) In Helan’s case, however, where her dd seems obsessed with correct spelling, I think telling her not to worry about spelling on the first draft would be called for.

Before my dd starts writing, though, I do remind her, “Try to remember to start every sentence with a capital and end it with a period.” This is then re-inforced through the editing. Eventually, we may even get to the point where I can say before a first draft, “Try to remember to use commas correctly,” but first things first. If Helan’s daughter is having a hard time editing drafts for spelling mistakes—that is, if she is having a hard time seeing which are wrong—Helan, as an initial matter, might go through and mark the misspelled words first for her dd to look up (as you suggested) and correct. Eventually, one would hope the dd will be able to see the errors on her own when she edits.

My dd is in fourth grade, an excellent reader and student, but cannot spell (notwithstanding 100s on her spelling tests). Just yesterday I sat down for tea with three other mothers from dd’s class and guess what? One of the mothers brought up the bad spelling issue—all our dds are among the top students and have the same spelling problems.

I had finally decided this needed to be nipped and hired a phonographix tutor for spelling two weeks ago—all the other mothers were wondering “When is this school going to teach them to spell?” Well, I say if they haven’t even begun to do it three-quarters of the way through fourth grade, they aren’t ever going to address it. The mothers were amazed I had actually hired a tutor. I think they had all bought into the “some people will just never learn to spell” myth and figured they would just have to have their dds rely on spellchecker in later life. (Even though they said that many of the words are spelled so badly, spellchecker wouldn’t have a chance.)

The PS is not too bad, but suffers from inattention to the backend operational things like spelling, handwriting, and math facts. I think the school views these as boring, mechanical rote processes, the teaching of which detracts from having the kids learn higher order critical and creative thinking. And really so unnecessary in this day of word processors, spellchecker, and calculators. Based on our tearoom discussion, I think there is now a group of mother who aren’t buying into this anymore.

In a way, I am glad that I catch (her teacher did as well) my dd whose name is Zoe’s spelling issue early on. She has worked on her spelling with a special ad. teacher for a couple of months, and I am given extra materials to work with her at home. We have pretty much secured the basic vowel sounds and she is able to handle the three letter words, as well as the magic “e” that changes the vowel sounds. Last week, she at last gets to understand the first two letter blends such as “pl” “sw” etc. We will work on three letter blends together this week.
I am not sure if Zoe is LD or not, but as her teacher said, some kids just did not get the phonetic rules naturally and have to be taught explicitly. I suppose Zoe is one of those. Then, my spelling is not really good, but survive on a spelling checker. I hope Zoe will improve to the point her spelling is readable by a computer.
It also seems to me the “editing” suggestion works. I did tell her that she should not spend so much time worrying about her spelling when she first writes as spellings should be fixed later. (She had “news” yesterday, and she told me she wrote quite a lot.) As she seems to have a good visual memory, she can see the words don’t look right after she has put them down. Yesterday, she actually offered to spell library as “libry” and I praised her. In before, she would just make a big fuss and insisted that I spelled it for her.
In many ways, your collective wisdom is indeed very helpful.

Helan

Helan,
I find it interesting that the teacher said that some kids do not learn phonetics naturally and have to be explicitly taught. I think I would put this the other way around: a few kids for reasons we do not understand well learn phonetics naturally but the vast majority have to be explicitly taught.

My ds, who is LD due to attention deficit and auditory processing, is one for whom all the phonetic rules came naturally—surprising in light of his disabilities. My dd is not LD, but was not explicitly taught phonetics and needed to be. (As you can tell from my previous post it appears the other girls, top students in their class, should have been as well.) Not explicitly teaching kids phonetics or, to use the more current phrase, phonemic awareness, is an example in my view of what Shay on this board calls “dysteachia.”

I’m glad the drafting went well. I find it very helpful for the kids to write only on every other line in their drafts to make editing easier and more readable. Good Luck.

If you can work with your son, you are a saint. Jami is almost impossible to work with (she already knows EVERYTHING if you know what I mean).

She currently uses a spellchecker on the computer and is probably 50% with it. I prefer her to use Draftbuilder with the auditory spellcheck, but she’s somewhat negative about it. She also mixes up (are they homonyms?), like blue and blew (I can’t think of the one she did the othe day)

I understand there is some great software called Text Help Read and Write Gold, especially for dyslexics. It’s about $400.00. It does a multitude of things, but I’d like to see a demo before I spend that much on software - Of course, they don’t provide demos.

Heard of anyone who has used it?

I think in my dd’s school, phonemic awareness is taught to the kids. But it is just that my dd is slow at picking up that sort of information and is not able to apply the information to her writing. But I can see that she is getting better, at least, she is more interested in how a word is spelled whereas in before, she basically just avoided anything that has to do with spelling.
It also seems to me to have her write down the word (even misspelled) on a piece of paper and then have her ‘edit’ it helps some what (since she has a rather good visual memory).
Last evening, we started on tackling CCCVC. The CCC blend such as str / spr/ is very difficult for her. We worked on just these two for 15 minutes, but she still did not get them. She first tended to put “str” as “srt” or just leave out the “t” etc. From an auditory perspective, how does one hear the three consonant sounds in words such as “string, strong, spring”? What I am trying with her is to break the word up as “ring” “tring” and then “string” and then try to read the word out very slowly to exaggerate each sound. But it doesn’t seem to work, or perhaps it just takes time for it to sink in. Any advice?

Helan, They are people qualified on this forum who can help you with this question (I’m just a mother), but they are not going to see your query as this thread has become too stale. I suggest you repost your question on the teaching reading board. You could also post on this board, but the reading board would be more on point. Marie

My nonLD daughter was taught using whole language. She is in 7th grade and is an avid reader. BUT she does not spell well, a fact I attribute to whole language. At one point, I did the PACE pretests with her and my LD son. My son scored higher on auditory processing than she!!! She was well above average on everything else but below average on auditory processing. She just must have enough other skills to compenstate.

Beth

I would keep trying„ but accept that it will come slowly. Be positive about improvements, and stress that you do expect to see some improvements. I rarely give up, although I do sometimes take a break on a subject for a few months.

Tre reverse sounding yuou were mentioning — ring, tring, string — was recommended in the past but has proved to be counter-productive; in general it is a bad idea to work back to front because that messes up ordiring.

When I am working on blends. I say the word once stressing the first sound: SString — and have the student say and/or write the first letter; then say it again over-stressing the next sound: s- T - ring — and have the student say and/or write the second letter; and so on. With a little practice, the student leanrs to hear and separate the blends herself.

I also use Scholar’s Choice Check and Double Check Phonics Book 2, which helps a lot with vowel patterns and digraphs and blends; available under ten dollars from scholarschoice.ca (note .ca, NOT .com)

Dear Victoria,

Thanks. You are quite right that the reverse sounding doesn’t quite work. When I worked with Zoe, my dd. last night, she some how managed to remember how to spell the few words we worked on — but had no idea about the building of the word from a number of sounds / shorter words that I taught her. Then, she was still not able to carry the str / scr sound to new words we haven’t worked on, which suggested that she was still not hearing the sound.

I am a bit confused — if one adopts the sequential approach, doesn’t one also rely on the reverse sounding approach, such as starting with “ing”, then “sing”, “sting”, and then “string”?

Helan

Yes, I also begin to suspect that the whole word approach does not help with spelling. I am not exactly sure how reading is taught at my dd’s school. I suppose it must be the whole word approach since she just brings home a new book everyday and we are instructed to read with her. Last year, she was taught those 100 high frequency words. Some how in the middle of her first year (last year) at school, she began reading quite fluently. But I think at her school, kids who don’t learn this way are pulled out to give phonetic instructions.

Helan

Thanks for your feedback. She has taken a break from LMB, since last October, but I think we are going to do some more work on reading this Summer (only 9 wks.). As long as she is continuing to stay up to/ahead of the standards, I will be pleased.

No, you don’t start with the “ing”, you end with the “ing”.

Say SSString, stressing the s. She should write the s.
Say s*T*ring, stressing the t. She should write the t.
Say stRRRRing, stressing the r. She should write the r.
Say str*ING* stressing the ing. Assuming that she already knows the ing ending, she should write ing. If she doesn’t know the ing, stress the short i sound (as in igloo, indian, in, it, fish) saying iiiiiiii; *then* stress the ng.

I greatly prefer to teach the ng sound separately from the i, since you need it in words like hang, strength, song, and lung — kids who are taught ing as a unit have a heck of a hard time leaving off the i and saying these properly.

The point I’m making is that you work in order, always; sounds in order of speech, writing in left to right order. This is a great relief to the student who never knows with the reverse system which direction to go in.
You help the child by bringing out the individual sounds with a very very overstressed pronunciation at first; then you back off the stress as the student learns to pick the sounds out for herself.

Beth — I would recommend working with your daughter on sounds and spelling. It is frequent for kids with high verbal skills but not so good writing skills to apparently do well in elementary school and even as in your case in junior high, but to hit some real difficulties in high school where the level of demand in reading and writing changes significantly. Since you’ve identified this weakness now, it would be a good thing to work on it sooner rather than later.