5th grader spelling errors, very poor writing skills in VA..

Teach him.

Have you requested that he be tested for services? If not, that is where I would start.

This is the reality..if you want your LD child to succeed, you need to teach him yourself or hire a qualified tutor.

I hate to be blunt, but if he is still at this level, he is not likely to get what he needs at school. You cannot force a school to give one-on-one instruction. You have to get that privately. Wilson is good but slower than some other options.

What is his reading level?

Here is a good remedial spelling program and there is a placement test online that you can try. But if the reading needs remediation, that should take priority. Scroll down to Spelling and you’ll see the link to the placement test.

http://www.oci-sems.com/bookstore/prod_teacher_resource.htm

I’ve taught in a couple of places in Virginia… like most of the rest of the country, it’s just not set up to teach things like spelling.
The schools in Virginia are often very knowledgeable about what they are legally required to do, and they do the best they can to provide it… but what they’re required to do and waht the students need are often not the same thing. (And there’s a wide range in quality of education even in counties in close proximity.) I’m afraid that what happens in middle school to kids who came in “pretty good kids with a pretty good attitude” from supportive families would depress you.
If he’s bright ****and**** has already learned a whole mess of compensatory skills (so actually it’s not good to be too bright, just above average), then he may be able to keep compensating and survive, especaially if he can learn to use either a spell checker or dictation software (which tends to spell things right even when it’s homophones).
How are his reading skills? Oral language skills? Vocabulary? WRiting skills? Study skills? What are the teachers’ perception? Is he doing “okay, for a child who isn’t that bright anyway - we can tell by his spelling” or is he “a very bright child who can’t spell… but he’s so bright he’ll get by”?
What happens in the next year or two could be critical as far as his future goes (but I suspect that’s what is driving you CRAZY). It is not as simple as learning to spell, though.
If you’re in the Richmond area you may have an advantage; The NEw Community School is right there and a mess of their students are there at public expense, and the very threat of due process has, I believe, improved education in the surrounding counties. (They have daily, intensive language remediation.) I don’t know if there are comparable schools in Northern Virginia.

For spelling, I recommend that you work with him at home. The best program I have found for parents to use is Sequential Spelling from http://www.avko.org. Click on “homeschoolers” and then on “Sequential Spelling”. This is a very inexpensive program and lessons take between 5 and 15 minutes (depending on how you do them). Carryover into daily writing is automatic, but you usually do not start seeing improvements until after lesson #60 or so. The daily lessons in this program are short enough to continue throughout the school year without overloading the child.

During the summer you could work on a grammar program. Shurley Grammar lays a good foundation for children who find written grammar to be challenging. Most of it is done orally (question/answer flow).

I agree with Janis that the school is unlikely to provide what your son requires. Your best bet is to do it yourself and/or hire a tutor for writing.

Nancy

All of his skills are above average, and he is in the gifted program as well. All of his skills, except writing and spelling! His vocabulary is advanced by several years ( four at the last testing), grammar is fine, comprehension is fine, reading is ahead by a year, straight a’s basically ( with oral testing, can’t test on paper).

I am going to move forward with getting the school to give him intensive help in this area, though we are working with him as well. There is a severe gap between his performance and ability when it comes to writing and spelling. They do need to do something, in addition to what we are doing. Thanks everyone for your input!

Have him tested for Dysgraphia. I have a nephew with a very high IQ who struggled horribly with writing and spelling. He was dx’d with Dysgraphia and given all his writing assignments on a laptop. It totally changed his life and kept him from dropping out of school.

Dysgraphia is a possibility. But I will repeat what I said earlier. It is rare for a school to remediate a reading disorder and even rarer to get meaningful help with a writing disorder, especially if it is severe enough to be labeled dysgraphia. It’s not that they don’t want to help, but it is unlikely that anyone there who knows how. And certainly, as scifinut recommended, you need to see about assistive devices to help as well.

Hi leedlelop,
I wonder if he may be a Verbal Thinker, where he has Visual processing difficulties?
Essentially being able to visualise, form mental images in his mind.
His 3 different spellings for a word, could suggest that he is relying on the ‘sound’ of word, for its spelling. Rather than recalling a visual mental image of the word.
This can also be a factor with bad hand-writing, where letters are not visually recalled in the mind as a reference. Instead they are constructed from recalling verbal directions.
Can he visualise letters and words in his mind?
Geoff.

I have a 10 years daughter who is in Year 5 at her primary school (in England). She is left handed and holds her pen/pencil very strangely my husband and I have been telling the teachers all the time and nothing has been done to rectify it. It is now too late and from year 1 we have told them her new teacher noticed how strangely she held her pen and told her off. So I made her aware of how we had been saying about it for years - you cannot now change the way your child holds her pen/pencil after all these years. Going back to your son I believe (as in England) he would have been given a statement or at least been assessed (if not privately as we did our 14 years when she was 7) and been given a 1:1 for help. We have governing bodies who could support you should your head teacher not support you or your local education authority! Good luck