Hello, I am working with a 3rd grade student, LD in basic reading skills. He has made tremendous progress in oral reading and comprehension, however his spelling continues to be nearly undeciferable (not a word!). Any suggestions??
Thank you, Jan
Spelling suggestions
The student is actually reading, not word-calling, as well as comprehending what he reads. Currently reading Magic Treehouse books. Encoding is not matching this rate of progress.
Re: Spelling Program for 3rd grade
Well *if* he can read nonsense words or words he doesn’t know, then you might take a look at avco spelling or one of the spelling programs some folks on the board are proferring. If you haven’t tried nonsense words, you can’t rule out a really well developed visual memory. Got one of those students right now. She is NOT word calling. She has good comprehension but she is in 4th grade and her time for visually recognizing words may soon be over. She does not hear sounds in words, or didn’t.
—des
Re: Spelling Program for 3rd grade
The question is: why is the spelling so awful?
It could be, as des alluded, that the child is accurately identifying words but doesn’t know which letters stand for which sounds — which you need to know to spell. (He’d be a bit more likely to spell better if he were wordcalling.)
It can also be normal development — spelling (encoding) is harder than reading (decoding).
Either way, I’d start with phonetically regular short words and do “letterbox lessons” (http://www.auburn.edu/~murraba has a good description), and start building a repertoire of words that he can write decipherably.
My favorite resource for spelling is Rudginsky & Haskell’s How To Teach SPelling (which can be had from http://www.rlac.com ) — but that may just be because I haven’t used AVKO. In your shoes I’d try & get the school to get me AVKO and HTTS as the latter would have a lot of good practice words and dictations to support AVKO.
In my experience, *all* spelling programs (including How To Teach Spelling — don’t know about AVKO b/c it’s not in my experience) tend to move too fast for most students I’ve taught. Keep that long-term learning in mind.
Re: Spelling Program for 3rd grade
To put it simplistically, a lot of kids who can read can’t spell because they have never been taught to spell. The “spelling” lessons all too often consist of testing a list of words, threatening the kid with dire consequences if he doesn’t study the words, and then testing again. Unfortunately there is often no teaching of **how** to study the words. In fact, with many kids I work with, they get quite upset when I try to teach the words, ie analyze them phonetically, look for commonalities in the list, look for irregularities, etc.; this simply Is Not Done in spelling class, which consists of hurry up and threaten. So you have to un-teach the habit of simply staring at the paper until drops of blood form on the forehead, the only “study” method known to most kids, then get the attention on the subject (the “I’ve already done that” syndrome) and then finally directly teach that all those phonics principles used to break words apart can also be used to put them together. This reversal/inversion thinking process is foreign territory to many people, children and adults both.
Since teaching higher order thinking skills, including looking at processes and operations from both sides, is our raison d’etre in offering education as opposed to daycare, this is an opportunity to get two birds with one stone. It isn’t all fun and games but it’s what’s worth doing.
Spelling
Do these children know how to segment a spoken word into its sounds? That’s the first requisite in being able to spell well. Once they can isolate the sounds, they need to know which graphemes (letters and letter strings) are used to represent those sounds. Once they learn which graphemes are used most frequently, their spelling will begin to improve — at least you’ll be able to read what they’ve written. Once they’ve gotten the basics, it’s time to start affixing the words and looking at multi-syllable words. Many longer words are related by meaning. Although the spellings remain constant, the sound changes as in nation/national. Many teachers have purchased The Spel-Lang Tree: Trunks for use with older students.
Grace at: http://www.spellangtree.org
You have to consider that although the kid is doing well in reading NOW, he may not in the future due to the fact that he may be reading everything by sight. This strategy will help him until about fourth grade. So how does he do reading nonsense words, say?
—des