Spelling problems

I have a dyslexic 10yo who’s reading fine now, but who still has major spelling problems. I’ve probably examined a dozen different spelling programs so far. We tried Spelling Power, but it did not work in that there was little carryover into dd’s writing. Our latest venture was Wanda Sanseri’s WISE Guide to Spelling — which would probably eventually work if we could stand the tediousness of it. I’m now awaiting AVKO’s Sequential Spelling, which seems to have a pretty good track record with dyslexics and is very easy to do. Website is http://www.avko.org

I think that a great deal of the spelling problem has less to do with visual memory (which is what I used to think) and a lot more to do with insensitivity to visual patterns in words (which is what some of the best research says). AVKO works on developing pattern sensitivity, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Gigi, who posts on the Reading and Math bb at http://www.vegsource.com, has been using AVKO for awhile now and is getting good results.

A book worth looking at is “Words Their Way” by Bear, et al. The word sorting seemed to be helpful, and there are many other activities detailled in the book. They provide a developmental schema for spelling also.

If you haven’t tried it, I would strongly recommend that you get the book “Reading Reflex” and use the Phono-Graphix method for reading. It can really help, and it’s pretty easy to do.

Mary

The first thing we need to realize is that spelling is developmental. There are at least three levels with which we have to deal. The first of these is ‘words which spell themselves,’ those which can be spelled just as they can be pronounced slowly by using the letters which directly represent the sounds. These are short vowel words as *cat, hat, man, am,* etc. The second level involves learning the various letter combinations which represent sounds such as letter combinations for long vowels (ai, ee, oa, ough, eigh, etc.) or consonant digraphs (sh, the, wh, sh, ph). The third level is dependent on word meaning such as maid / made or words which are derived from other such as nation and national where the first vowel sound changes but the spelling remains the same.

I like to think in terms of generalities rather than rules for spelling since there are always many exceptions to rules. Looking for words which fit particular spelling patterns is helpful. Then look for the words within the spelling patterns which don’t fit the pronunciation patterns and you quickly identify those words which must be learned as sight words. Also, having children say the words slowly will help them develop phonemic awareness, an awareness of the separate sounds in spoken words. If one teaches them which letter strings are legitimate and which are not, it will help them make good decisions in their spelling attempts. For example, *oa* is a legitimate vowel spelling but *ao* would most likely indicate a separation of syllables since it isn’t a legitimate spelling for a long vowel sound.

Another key are is called syllable juncture, knowing when and when not to double a consonant after the first syllable (hoping, hopping).

Perhaps we’ll never make some students perfect spellers but there’s a lot we can do the help them do a better job — and learning to spell will make them better readers.

Grace

The Spalding Method is the best program out there to teach spelling and reading. You can get information on training at www.spalding.org. They have a teacher training and a parent training. Great program! It works real well with students with learning disabilities.
Lori

Dear Susan,

Those of us who teach reading can sympathize with your problem. Many of us are weak spellers. We marvel at the home-school children who win national spelling bees. Many excellent reading teachers would fail rather quickly at these events.

If English were perfectly phonetic in print (as it is in speech), we could simply teach encoding (associating sounds with letters) and decoding would be simply the reverse (setting down letters for sounds). We know this is not true.

It might prove useful to teach a struggling beginner to master the 1001 words and symbols that account for 75 percent of all the English words in print. Get a list and work until they have been learned thoroughly. Begin with: the, of, and, etc. These are the words all writers must use. Then encourage the habit of using the dictionary for verification of less common words.

I still wonder if the word I want to write ends -ence -ance -er -or -ur -ar -yr -ir.

Best wishes.

Peace.

Susan:

<>

Since your son has already completed 3/4 of the LiPS program, why don’t you continue with Lindamood and do the SEEING STARS program for reading and spelling? The manual is very specific about how to address those sight words. I’ve been using it in the resource room all year, and I think that it works quite well.

Marilyn

I agree that using Lindamood-Bell’s Seeing Stars program would make the most sense since that’s what your son’s already familiar with. Having done so much of the LIPS program already, he ought to do well with SS. I’m surprised actually that SS wasn’t automatically incorporated into LIPS; it’s easy to do it as you’re doing LIPS.

Seeing Stars is probably the second easiest LMB program (next to V/V) to teach out of without having had the training. Just read and follow the book carefully. They also have a 1000 word list you can use. (He may already have used it to learn them as sight words). I use the list as both a reading/spelling list.

I read these messages with interest since I have two children who struggle with spelling. Both of them spell phonetically fairly well, but they have difficulty transferring patterns to their writing. My younger daughter is going into 2nd grade and I’m having her tutored in Phono-Graphix this summer (her reading is above grade level, but I want her to become more comfortable with multisyllable word reading). The tutor said that spelling is difficult to remediate. The problem is also that the school teacher had the first graders writing in many journals where my daughter continued to practice incorrect spellings. The tutor told me just today that a lot of spelling is visual memory. I was saying that deciding whether to spell proud “proud” or “prowd” does not really depend upon any “rules” that I know. It ssems to me that visual memory does factor in. However, I agree that seeing the spelling patterns in words is extremely important as well.

The school uses the Houghton Mifflin spelling program, which is co-authored by Donald Bear, one author of Words Their Way. It is not a bad spelling program (I was on the spelling adoption committee, so I have seen the program — as well as the spelling my 4th grader brought home this year). 1st grade is almost all word families, which after using PG I don’t have much faith in.

Anyway, if anyone has any other ideas for improving spelling, I’m up for suggestions.

Thanks,

Margo

The latest thinking on spelling, esp. in 1st. grade is that when writing in journals or during a silent writing time, spelling doesn’t need to be corrected. However, IN ALL OTHER AREAS, it must be. I think that lots of educators went overboard originally when encouraging writing skills and stopped correcting any misspellings. But since spelling is still, at 6 or 7 years old, such a trial that the child can’t concentrate on both getting the thoughts out AND the spelling right, the teacher may have been allowing incorrect spellings in the journal for that reason. Hopefully it was being corrected in all other written work.

I have trouble with word families for spelling only because once they’re learned, they don’t seem to be practiced so the kids easily forget them. I haven’t used this but I’d like to: Orton Ghillingham’s (I don’t know how to spell THAT name!) personal spelling dictionaries where the students categorize new words as they come upon them into word families. Their weekly spelling list is generated using some words from previously learned categories so they get the repetition. I like that. My biggest complaint about all the spelling books I’ve seen is that kids memorize the words, even memorize the phonics rule, but don’t get the repetition they need to remember that, for instance, there’s fur, sir, her - all with the same sound but they have to learn the individual words’ spellings.

Taking a cue from LMB’s Seeing Stars program, I have all kids (1,2,3 grade) air write the new words in their spelling list each week. Air writing is said to stimulate that visual memory. I also like to do prefix/suffix work with them at an earlier age than most. For instance, if they can memorize the various suffix patterns introduced slowly, they not only can read those multisyllable words better, but they can spell them better too.

Dear June,

Your attempt to teach your child to spell has brought you to a realization. Alerting beginners to the existence of patterns in print and rhyme in English words is a useful tool—but it is only one of several tools that facilitate the teaching reading and spelling.

Someone wants to make strawberry shortcake. A strawberry huller is a useful tool for removing stems and leaves, but it is a poor tool for whipping cream. A rolling pin is a useful tool for rolling dough, but it is a poor tool for slicing berries. The successful cook chooses and uses her tools appropriately.

Mat, sat, cat and map, sap, cap are helpful patterns, but that tool alone (pattern knowledge) will not help one to read and spell large numbers of words. Other tools are required. English is brimming with homonyms. It is difficult enough to find a means to sound them out when they appear in print; spelling the hundreds of such words from dictation is impossible. Try it. Just dictate: do, dew, due.

The first bit of prior knowledge a beginner needs before he is able to spell is knowledge of letters—their names and shapes. How else can one spell aloud, on paper, or on a computer?

The second bit of knowledge one needs is awareness that homonyms exist—some words that have identical sounds when they are spoken have different meanings.

The third bit of knowledge one needs is that is necessary to know the context for a precise homonym one wishes to spell. Jack through the ball into the heir. (Could it be threw?) Prince Charles is air to the thrown of England. (Could it be throne?).

GE teaches its apprentices, “Perfection is impossible. The closer we try to come to perfection, the more costly the product becomes.” There are few perfect spellers.

Your bright child who is willing to work hard to improve his spelling can do so. The first words he should be taught are the words he is most likely to need. Only 1,021 words and symbols account for about 75 percent of all the English words in print. Help the child to memorize these words and use his dictionary for others. I can find no other way to resolve your “biggest complaint.” Nothing really teaches spelling. There are no shortcuts. We have to learn by repetition. The fortunate among us memorize, retain, and retrieve easily. The rest of us have to work hard. There are no iron-clad guarantees of success.

Peace.

What you are doing with the Dolch list sounds really good — steady progress with enough review to make it stick. Also the combination of frequently-used words on the Dolch list with training in phonic skills (so 90% of the words can be figured out logically, and each one is not a separate memory load) is a very good plan. As long as this is not too time-consuming or overloading him with extra work, I’d say keep it up. Good structure, and don’t argue with success. Keep stressing phonic structures so he doesn’t hit memory overload. If he does plateau out (and this happens with all of us) take a break for a month or two and do some review phonics, and then go back to it.
You will find in upper elementary that a lot of kids who were “ahead” of your son do plateau out, badly, and many stall for good; they were depending solely on visual memory and these kids get a real shock as vocabulary grows and their skills don’t. Your son has a very good chance of pulling ahead of average if you stick to steady progress.

It’s true that one needs a number of tools to learn to read and spell—just one tool won’t do the trick. Something to consider regarding those who struggle with dyslexia, however: simple repetition alone won’t do the trick, either, no matter how bright they are. A bright person with dyslexia could copy and copy a word over and over, and still spell it incorrectly the next time he takes a spelling test.

To illustrate what I’m trying to say, I’m going to type here some excerpts from Eileen Simpson’s now-classic autobiography, REVERSALS: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF VICTORY OVER DYSLEXIA © 1979. The first excerpt is from Chapter 2, which covers Eileen’s year in 4th grade during the 1920s:
___________________________________________________________

Miss Henderson had no patience with my grandmother’s indulgent attitude, and thought psychology was a euphemism for mollycoddling. She was clear in her mind that the problem was less the result of stupidity, although she thought I was certainly at best borderline, than of laziness and carelessness. It was no good my knowing that 6x6=36 if on the exam I wrote 63. My right-handed penmanship, while far from pretty, was acceptable, but again I couldn’t seem to copy anything from the blackboard the way it was written. My memory was of the “Swiss-cheese variety”—strong in some areas, nonexistent in others. Where it was nonexistent, it was the result of inattentiveness. It was inattentiveness that made my spelling “completely unacceptable.” In her initial alarm about my reading, Miss Henderson had overlooked my poor spelling. Now my report cards carried another “Failure.”

While I have no record of how I read at that time, I do have a sample of my spelling. It is a letter written the previous year at Farmingdale. Since my spelling didn’t improve for a long time, it gives an indication of the work I was handing in to Miss Henderson. Ordinarily, I left it to Marie to correspond with our relatives, claiming that I could never thing of “anything to say,” so this letter was undoubtedly written as a class exercise. There are signs that Miss Barnes gave me considerable help with it. She also probably made suggestions about its contents. It reads:

Deare Uncel
The Dr. was hear today and examimimed us. we are booth feeling well. I hope to hear from you soon the mail cames here twice day. It is very nirl here.we eat well and sleep well.
Your loving nice,

This naked plea for mail—originally spelled “male,” erased and corrected—was considerably worked over before it was sent out. The writing is legible (although with a strong downward slant to the right-hand corner), but the paper looks messy because of the large number of erasures. Even “The” was erased and rewritten. “Dr.” must have been copied from the blackboard because I knew as little about abbreviation as I did about punctuation. “Very” was begun as “yer”; “nirl” for “nice” may have been an example of the kind of fudging I practiced for years: When in doubt I wrote letters loosely, hoping the reader would credit me with the correct spelling.

Since Miss Henderson didn’t permit erasures on test papers, and the only help I received—and that furtively—was from Arnie, it is small wonder that my spelling grade in 4A2 was “Failure.”

___________________________________________________________

But for the erasures and corrections, her letter probably would have looked something like this:
___________________________________________________________

Deare Uncel
Teh Dr. was hear today and examimimed us. we are booth feeling well. I hope to hear from you soon the male cames here twice day. It is yer nirl here.we eat well and sleep well.
Your loving nice,

___________________________________________________________

Here’s another excerpt from Chapter 4, which covers her years in 5th and 6th grade:
___________________________________________________________

Miss Shapiro, my sixth grade teacher, I often suspected had spies in the library, for she blamed my poor spelling on my lack of “outside reading.” It was a mystery to her how I’d reached her grade, spelling as I did. The mystery to me was how others knew what order to put the letters in. Had all spelling been taught by rules, in jingles one could learn by rote, such as

Write i before e
Except after c
Or when sounded as a
As in neighbor and weigh

I would have managed far better than I did. Better, but still not well. The jingle helped me to spell “niece” (an important word for me—I was a niece many times over and had to sign myself “Your loving niece” in thank-you letters for birthday and Christmas gifts), but it didn’t keep me from transposing letters (“nad” for “and”), adding and subtracting others (“bfore” for “before”), or adding and subtracting syllables “examimine” for “examine”). My memory, which served me well in some ways, was no help in spelling. I seemed not to be able to recall a way a word looked. Even when I happened to spell a word correctly, it often looked wrong, so I doctored it to make it look right. “Dear” looked incomplete to me, so I added a final “e.”

If Miss Shapiro appreciated my good behavior and was amused by my clowning, she was blinded by neither. Where I had been able to fool my fifth grade teacher by writing a letter which could stand for “a,” “i,” or “e” when I was in doubt about what the vowel should be, Miss Shapiro would encircle the equivocal penmanship and put an X next to the word. As she often said, one had to get up early in the morning to fool her.

The long list of failed words from spelling tests I took home at the beginning of Christmas vacation, each to be rewritten fifty times, I had made little progress on before I came down with the flu. When I returned to school six weeks later, the list in hand, Miss Shapiro said,

“So you’re back at last. Convalescence is an ideal time for reading. Come tell the class what books you’ve read.”

Convalescence had been a very trying time for me. After the first two weeks, I had been sure I was well enough to go out to play, but my fever chart said I wasn’t. Marie, who also had the flu, had been quite content to read, and had prodded me to follow her example. Some of the books I’d charged out of the Inwood Library, and had returned unread, mysteriously reappeared on the table with the vase of sweet peas and the glass that held the thermometer. It was either the spelling words to write,

examine
examine
examine
examine

until inattentiveness made it again

examimine

which I coped over and over, reinforcing my error. Or books. In desperation, I turned to them. The one with the fewest pages and the most pictures was the one I settled one…

…”Six weeks at home, and that’s ALL you’ve read! Don’t you realize how important reading is for spelling? You can’t go to seventh grade spelling like a third grader. You don’t want to be left back, do you?”

If there was anything that could have made me nostalgic for the days of confinement when, with feverish brow pressed against the icy windowpane, I had watched my friends down on the street throw snowballs or, with sleds under their arms, head toward Fort George for an afternoon of tobogganing, it was this threat of being left back. How could I, who at the best of times limped along behind the class like a lame dog behind a wagon, possibly catch up now?

I tried. Even more, I worried. If, by staying after school two afternoons a week, I could make up enough arithmetic to pass, I knew there was no possible way I could catch up in spelling, and Miss Shapiro’s pep talks about “trying hard” only discouraged me further. The enormous and enervating effort I had made after the threat of being left back made my head feel as it had when I was coming down with the flu. What was the use? I’d ask myself, when another Friday exam paper was returned with eight words wrong out of ten. After a while, I gave up worrying about how far ahead the class was, and concentrated instaed on my relative position vis-a-vis Brontislava, the newly arrived Latvian girl. If I tried extra, extra hard to memorize words for the Friday tests, it was because the previous week Brontislava had made fewer mistakes than I, and I was afraid she and I would change positions, and I would again be at the bottom of the class.

___________________________________________________________

And here’s another excerpt, this time from Chapter 6:
___________________________________________________________

No matter how much training I had had in spelling, I, like most dyslexics, would probably never have become a good speller. As Orton said, and remedial teachers have since confirmed, poor spelling cannot be cured. It can be improved, however, vastly improved, by thorough training in phonetics and the learning of spelling rules, like the very useful “i before e.”

Since spelling and intelligence are so inextricably linked in the minds of the educated public that they use a person’s spelling as a rough-and-ready test of his intelligence (a linkage no efforts by psychologists are likely to break), the importance of teaching spelling cannot be overestimated. Dyslexics resist writing because they are reluctant to project an image of themselves which they feel does not do their intelligence justice. Also, they are aware that nothing is easier to ridicule than incorrect spelling.

Knowing how little chance I had of writing, without error, the kind of thank-you note that would have expressed my genuine feelings about a gift, I resorted to a safe (or almost safe) and wooden formula:

Deare Aunt or Uncle So and So,
Thank you for the ___ . It is just what I wanted. I hope you and Aunt (or Uncle So and So) are well. Marie and I are both fine.
Your loving niece (“i” before “e,” etc.) niece,

Even so, rarely did my note pass the censor. As often as not, Auntie returned it with the “dear” or some other word corrected, and the instruction to rewrite it before it was sent out. Had I learned the rule that in words with ea, the silent a usually signals that the e is long, I would have known that there is no need for a final e on “dear” and would not have wasted time speculating about whether to put it on or leave it off.

Instead of coming to a dead stop every time I had to add a verb suffix, such as —ing or -ed, to a word, I would have learned to apply the 1-1-1 rule: if in a word there is one syllable, one (and only one) vowel, and one consonant after the vowel, one doubles the last consonant before adding the suffix. So “swim” becomes “swimming”; “rub”—”rubbing”; “shop”—”shopping.” On the other hand, the final consonant is not doubled in “stand” and “crash,” because, having two consonants after the vowel, these words are not governed by the 1-1-1 rule.

While no amount of looking at, or writing, the word “swimming” would have taught me to spell it correctly, and not “swiming” or “swimiming,” I could have remembered the rule. A few lessons to learn it, repeated drill to reinforce it, and I would have had it firmly in my head for ready reference.

___________________________________________________________

Now that I’ve included some excerpts about Eileen’s spelling and the kind of training needed to improve it, I’m going to include a few excerpts about the difficulties involved when a dyslexic tries to improve his spelling by looking up words in the dictionary. The first is a quote Eileen included at the beginning of Chapter 7:

“The difficulty in consulting dictionaries, etc., is probably typical. I cannot glance down a page and pick out a word I’m looking for, but have to scrutinize every word…” (from an autobiographical fragment written by a retired lawyer, a dyslexic, in READING DISABILITY, by Knud Hermann)

___________________________________________________________

The 2nd excerpt , from the same chapter, concerns Eileen’s own difficulties in dictionary usage (the chapter covers her high-school education):

___________________________________________________________

In my post-flu crisis, I had appealed to Marie for help. If she would just begin the translation for me, so that I knew what it was about…Marie helped me until the day Auntie pointed out to her that she was in effect doing my homework for me. More serious still, she was encouraging me to be dependent on her and giving me a false sense of security. Afterward, Marie refused her assistance unless I knew all the vocabulary, had made a conscientious effort on my own, and then had got stuck.

Look up ALL THOSE WORDS? That required running through the alphabet, forgetting where I was, beginning again, running through the alphabet, forgetting where I was…it took TIME. If I did that, I would never get through my homework. Didn’t Marie care that I was likely to become a repeater? Every evening there was a scene between us. I nagged, pleaded, whined, wept. Marie stood firm.

___________________________________________________________

For good measure, I’m going to include 1 more excerpt from Chapter 4 of another autobiography, SUSAN’S STORY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT OF MY STRUGGLE WITH DYSLEXIA (© 1982), the story of Susan Hampshire, the famous British actress:

___________________________________________________________

To my mother, Latin and Greek were synonymous with good education and wisdom. Was this word or that word derived from the Greek or Latin? It was most important to my mother that I should know these things.

“No one will ever think you’re retarded or a fool if you do. It’s indifference in life that…”

“But Mummy!”

She’s cut me short. I was not allowed to protest when she’d set her mind to something.

“Go and look it up in the dictionary. Look up ‘indifferent.’”

I dreaded being asked to look something up, even a number in the address book. I would slide off with one of the eight Oxford Dictionaries that littered our little box of a sitting-room, along with mountains of uncorrected exercise books, unposted bills, and unfinished cups of tea, and go into the bathroom. I would sit on the lavatory seat (still my favourite place to work), and gaze at the dark blue book. After twenty minutes of to-ing and fro-ing amongst the soft, slithering pages, I would have to go back to my mother and admit, “I can’t find ‘indifferent.’”

“Try!”

So back I went to the bathroom. Was it “endefarint,” “endifarent,” or “endeferent“? It could be absolutely anything. Eventually, I’d slope back to the sitting room.

“What comes after E.N.D.?”

“Indifferent—think, think, say the word indifferent. How does it sound? What’s that first letter? What’s the sound of the first letter? It’s ‘I,’ isn’t it? Go back and look up I.N.D.”

And so it dragged on, an hour, an hour and a half, two hours, shuffling between the sitting room and the bathroom, sitting on the plastic lid, now warm, looking out of the window at the river, clutching the book, and saying to myself, “I can’t look up ‘indifferent,’, I don’t know how to spell ‘indifferent,’ I can’t even find the I’s.”

There are no set patterns for people with spelling difficulties. They will spell “indifferent” three ways in the course of one paragraph, know it one day and not the next.

___________________________________________________________

I could go on and on, but I suspect you get the idea (if you didn’t get it long before [grin]). Simple repetition alone won’t do the trick, and using a dictionary can be a dyslexic’s nightmare because of his spelling problems. Before you can look up a word, first you have to know how it’s spelled. The bright child with severe spelling difficulties is going to need a different kind of training from that needed by the average child, to learn how to spell better than he does. (I should add that Eileen’s I.Q., according to an I.Q. test she took as an adult, tested in the 95th percentile of the general population, so she’s quite bright.)

Yours truly,
Kathy Green

Arthur wrote:
>
> Dear June,
>
> Your attempt to teach your child to spell has brought you to
> a realization. Alerting beginners to the existence of
> patterns in print and rhyme in English words is a useful
> tool—but it is only one of several tools that facilitate the
> teaching reading and spelling.
>
> Someone wants to make strawberry shortcake. A strawberry
> huller is a useful tool for removing stems and leaves, but it
> is a poor tool for whipping cream. A rolling pin is a useful
> tool for rolling dough, but it is a poor tool for slicing
> berries. The successful cook chooses and uses her tools
> appropriately.
>
> Mat, sat, cat and map, sap, cap are helpful patterns, but
> that tool alone (pattern knowledge) will not help one to read
> and spell large numbers of words. Other tools are required.
> English is brimming with homonyms. It is difficult enough to
> find a means to sound them out when they appear in print;
> spelling the hundreds of such words from dictation is
> impossible. Try it. Just dictate: do, dew, due.
>
> The first bit of prior knowledge a beginner needs before he
> is able to spell is knowledge of letters—their names and
> shapes. How else can one spell aloud, on paper, or on a
> computer?
>
> The second bit of knowledge one needs is awareness that
> homonyms exist—some words that have identical sounds when
> they are spoken have different meanings.
>
> The third bit of knowledge one needs is that is necessary to
> know the context for a precise homonym one wishes to spell.
> Jack through the ball into the heir. (Could it be threw?)
> Prince Charles is air to the thrown of England. (Could it be
> throne?).
>
> GE teaches its apprentices, “Perfection is impossible. The
> closer we try to come to perfection, the more costly the
> product becomes.” There are few perfect spellers.
>
> Your bright child who is willing to work hard to improve his
> spelling can do so. The first words he should be taught are
> the words he is most likely to need. Only 1,021 words and
> symbols account for about 75 percent of all the English words
> in print. Help the child to memorize these words and use his
> dictionary for others. I can find no other way to resolve
> your “biggest complaint.” Nothing really teaches spelling.
> There are no shortcuts. We have to learn by repetition. The
> fortunate among us memorize, retain, and retrieve easily. The
> rest of us have to work hard. There are no iron-clad
> guarantees of success.
>
> Peace.

Mary MN - how is the AVKO Sequential Spelling going? I have gotten the Reading Reflex and we are working on it. My DS seems to like it. As part of his daily work that we are doing he is writing a childrens book for his infant cousin. We will then use the computer to print it using WORD to assist in spell checking. I really appreciate your in put.

Arthur - I have gotten a list of the 1000 most used words from a website. We are working from that list now. My DS didn’t want to work from the baby list anymore. I am concentrating on the words that are on both lists.

Third shift and June - we had planned on doing a “brush-up” session with his Lips tutor just before school starts. This has been scheduled. However, I wanted to give him a break on the intensive tutoring he has work so hard on for the last 3 summers (his whole school career). Not to mention a slight break on the pocket book. He had a fun summer in camps and with buddies. Lips is miraculous BUT expensive. We feel the $8000 + spent last year was well worth it and would spend it again in a minute to remediate reading (which it did) but I feel I can help him with the spelling issue. $55 / hour to teach him spelling which he may never be a good speller (the little words or sight words are the real issue) and he will be able to the computer from this point on in school for most witten projects.

Victoria - thanks for you comments and views. I am trying to pull the pieces of different programs that seem to work for him. I remember distinctly when my daughter was in the forth grade “the playing field leveled out” in all subject areas. I realize this will be somewhat different since she didn’t have dyslexia. At this point his self esteem has been very strong. I am hoping that will continue. I also remember he will have the opportunity to write reports on the computer from this point on. So I feel if we get the dolch list and the other most commonly used words down he will be set for essay questions (spelling wise). Sentence structure will be the next hurdle, but, I can reinforce at the same time the learning is happening verses playing catch up. Thanks again.victoria wrote:

We’ve only been doing it a few days. So far, I ***really*** like it. It’s easy to do and doesn’t take a lot of time. What impressed me during the 4th lesson was that dd started self-correcting.

The real test is whether or not what dd learns transfers into her writing. It’s going to take a few weeks to see if that’s the case. My hunch is that it will, but that’s just a hunch at this point.

Mary

I have noticed that my ds has been self correcting when we are test sight words, especially since we started RR (may be coincidence). I find it very exciting. Thanks again.

LOL! Kathy G.,

I agree with your post entirely and that’s why I support our school’s (it’s a private school) encouragement of the use of the laptop from 4th grade on for kids with spelling/writing issues. It’s a tool that they’ll end up using forever - or till something better comes along.

The various spelling programs all help get a kid to the point where using a computer to correct spelling is feasible. I like the Seeing Stars program because it’s what I’m most familiar with, Reading Reflex borrows heavily from the Lindamood-Bell program and appears quite good.

But ultimately, we’d be doing these kids a disservice if we didn’t move them to a computer. They end up getting those skills down before the other kids are required to use computers for their reports - a very good thing since the kids we’re talking about need that extra time. Eventually everyone who has a computer is expected to use it for reports anyhow so why not get these kids a head start?

I’ve seen countless kids gain back their confidence once they make the switch over to a computer. They usually need a tutor to get them going, but once they’ve gotten comfortable, they’re so much happier. We want people to be literate, to be able to make themselves understood. Since most of the written communications in business take place on the computer, it’s surely the right tool to be using.