I am the mother of a 5th grade, 12 year old girl with a SLD in the area of written language. She has an IEP, but I and very concerned about her lack of observable progress in writing and spelling. My daughter has always done well in spelling tests because we make her study the words on the list. However, despite 100% on spelling tests year after year, this knowledge does not appear to transfer over to her written assignments. For example, in a paper she wrote for her 5th grade Promotion policy, the grader noted that “spelling is so bad sometimes it was difficult to understand the meaning.”
My daughter’s LRC teacher maintains that, since my daughter gets As on spelling tests, she does not have a problem with spelling. We have complained to the school district, and they are apparently supportive of the LRC teacher.
I have heard that it is more effective to teach spelling patterns rather than lists of isolated words. Can anyone point me to research supporting this point that I can share with our special education director and my daughter’s LRC teacher? Can anyone recommend any spelling curriculum characteristics that we can request be utilized during her next IEP review? (for example, that is the “structured sequential phonics” equivalent for teaching spelling?)
BTW, I did purchase “Step Up to Writing” upon the recommendation of this board and my daughter is now writing awesome accordian paragraphs!
I have not received any work samples of my daughter’s resource room work since before Christmas.
My daughter’s resource room teacher maintains that my daughter has not has not
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Re: Effective Ways of Teaching Spelling?
Yes, I was going to recommend AVCO Sequential Spelling as well. But I think ALL kids need a phonetic spelling program and advocated for that at my child’s school last year. The article I am posting is in regard to regular spelling instruction, but it holds even more true for LD kids who need even more structured spelling instruction.
http://teacher.scholastic.com/professional/teachstrat/foorman.htm
AVCO:
http://www.spelling.org/Default.htm
Janis
Re: Effective Ways of Teaching Spelling?
Can’t help you with the spelling because I need to buy the book Janis mentioned and haven’t yet because spelling is hard to teach to get into the brain long term.
I am glad to hear you have had success with Step Up to Writing. I love it too. I’m curious, did you just buy the one teacher’s manual or did you buy the parent book? Was it easy to understand? I’d like to know as I am recommending Step to some friends of mine so I need to see how much they would need to buy in order to teach it with as little investment as possible.
Michelle
Re: Effective Ways of Teaching Spelling?
I called Sopris West and talked to customer service, and the only book they seemed to have was the 2nd edition of the Manual. All I puchased was the manual, because the customer service rep told me that most of the student handouts are in the manual. (The last section of the manual is workshop materials, and I have been using these as blackline masters for my daughter.)
If money were no object, I would probably go ahead and purchase the student materials. It is more time consuming to create your own, but it is doable. For example, today I wrote an “accordian paragraph” and had my daughter highlight the topic sentence, the reason/details/facts and explainations all in different colors. It does slow down the teaching, and requires greater committment on Mom’s part, to first create the materials.
Jody
Re: Effective Ways of Teaching Spelling?
I am a parent. I agree with the others that the child needs to be taught spelling patterns rather than isolated words. Our school did isolated words for years…its a big dictionary. Big waste of time. If you can’t find a spelling book that you are happy with you might see if the library has phonics books intended for reading instruction such as hooked on phonics (just page after page of words that fit the same pattern from c-at b-at r-at to na-tion, sta-tion.)You could use a page at a time for spelling practice. Unfortunately, this does not always guarantee good spelling. My own 4th grade son was taught extensive phonics. There are many ways to write the A sound such as ai a-e etc. He will inevidably pick the wrong one for the word in question. There’s another problem. Does he use what he does know when he writes? Alas, no…..He knows how to spell said and going etc etc but when he writes he just transcribes speech sounds as he hears them so you get things like “he sed he wuz gowing down to brecfist.” I’m considering trying rote practice copying sentences with common high frequency words. There is a Fry list of high frequency words you should be able to find out on the net somewhere if that would be helpful. Good luck.
Sequential Spelling (http://www.avko.org) has been very effective for us. It teaches by means of patterns in words. You could use it at home. We do two lessons a day, from different parts of the book, so we can get through it faster. Carryover into everyday writing has been automatic.
Angie