Trouble Retaining Info?

What helps my son is writing them on different sufaces, for example on a white board, on paper and a magic doodle. We practice in short frquent sessions through-out the week.

How are you studying them? We have found using various ‘input’ methods tends to stick long enough to make it to the spelling test on Fridays! (getting it to stick for good, is the magic question)

We practice both orally and visually. I will have her write the word down and then I will have her spell it auditorily. She also has to airwrite it - both forwards and backwards. I will also spell the letters on her back as she is repeating the letters. Sometimes I will have her write the misspelled word 5 times (never more than that) - but I learned to cover up each line as she spells it. I caught her just copying from the line above and thus she was not having to ‘think’ about how she was spelling it. When she was young, we did rainbow color spelling. I would use different color pencils and color code the different sound patterns. This tended to help her visualize the word better.

My dd’s problem is that she wants to spell everything phoneticallly. She doesn’t visually ‘see’ the word or link it back to when she is writing. She has very poor symbol imagery.

Multiple short sessions thru the week worked the best. And then you just hold your breath and praise her end of week spelling score (even tho she may have missed the one word that she spelled correctly all week long!)

My son is 8yrs old and considered a “slow learner”. I have found great success with PG (phono-graphix). It does not teach the children to memorize the words, but to sound the words out, and that every sound is a sound picture. I would recommend “Reading Reflex” by Carmen Guinness. It sounds like your daughter is memorizing her words, which will not help in teaching her how to read or spell. My son has a very very bad short term memory. But his long term is great (as in remembering a year ago where we went, or a place he has been too).
This book is wonderful. Do a search for it here on the board. There are ton’s of people who can give you more info, maybe post something in “teaching Children with LD”.

Also, my son is ADD and has dyslexia and is mild cognative. It is really doing wonders for him.

Another technique that can be helpful is spelling the words for your daughter, with about one second between each letter, and then having your daughter tell you what the word is. You may need to start with very simple two-sound and three-sound words at first. This technique encourages the child to visualize the word.

You also may want to try Sequential Spelling from http://www.avko.org . This program works on spelling subskills that most spelling programs take for granted — things such as short-term visual memory, pattern recognition, sequencing, and visualization.

Nancy

If she has dyslexia, it’s quite possible that she doesn’t ‘get’ the pattern of spelling. My own dyslexic son doesn’t and to pass a spelling test, he must laboriously memorize each letter of each word. As a consequence, he too quickly forgets them.

Are the words given in word families? Like bake, rake, cake, lake? If they are, it might help her to understand the underlying pattern or rule. If not, then likely she has to memorize each letter of each word and how long can that be retained?

Your post was titled trouble retaining information but spelling words isn’t really ‘information’. For dyslexics, memorizing the spelling of words is almost like asking them to memorize the pattern of grains of sand on the beach.