My 4th grade remediated dyslexic ADHD’er starts school tomorrow.
I got her IEP in the mail Saturday. She is in “transition” after making fantastic reading/writing progress in the last two school years. Her remaining issue is spelling. While she moved leaps and bounds in all measures, spelling hasn’t budged a bit in the percentiles.
Part of it is spelling is difficult for her - she remains a phonetic speller. Part of it is also, if she is mastering something new, e.g., writing structure, she is paying so much attention to that, she can’t concentrate on the spelling also. Part of it also is the inconsistency in ADHD and racing through work - slowing down and/or proofreading her work is well, unatural to her.
This was discussed at the committee meeting - the goal is to get her to pay attention to her spelling and self correct or proofread on a regular basis (if her fragile self esteem gets clobbered in the process, I will go crazy). Preferrably, I would think the classroom teacher should “pick and choose” her battles and come up with her own plan. In the hands of the right teacher (which she will have), this could and should happen.
My thought is she may never be a great speller, but she has a shot at being a good speller and should learn to self correct in elementary before possibly the less tolerant middle/high school years. If the effort isn’t made now, it’ll probably remain a problem for her all through school.
Instead, the IEP came back with “X will circle spelling errors and self correct” under the testing modifications section. I think this is wrong in that 1) it puts the entire responsibility on dd should they follow the IEP to the letter (which they will), 2) it will make her feel different compared to the other kids and 3) it shouldn’t be limited to tests only but nor should it have to apply to everything she does either. But, I can’t figure out a way as to how to articulate better goals in writing. Any suggestions??? Please????
The IEP had several major problems like typos, wrong classification, so I’m hoping to help the overworked special ed teacher out by sending them the corrections (with the spelling suggestion too).
If you can help me, THANK-YOU!!!!! Sorry so long. I’m also going to post this under other bulletin boards here.
My dd is now in 8th grade - spelling is better but continues to be a problem. I can’t find her current IEP tonight,but it includes the following information:
“…will need assistance in acquiring editing skills. She will need access to spell checkers, dictionaries, and personal editors. Her work should be graded on grounds of content rather than spelling until she acquires these editing skills. She should be allowed to produce lengthy written assignments on a computer with spellcheck capabilities.”
We didn’t discover her problems until the end of the fifth grade. By that time, spelling was just one source of major frustration. By 5th grade the words were too hard. Others on the LD Bulletin Boards suggested working out a deal with the teacher. She picked three of four words she wanted to work on to master for the week. She took the test with everyone else, and circled the number next to the words she had selected. Only those words counted toward her grade. The teacher also added the option for students to choose words they commonly misspelled to their weekly list. So in our case, she picked words she used all the time but spelled wrong. She mastered many words like - because, their and there - this way. The teacher has to be willing to work with the student so that they learn something and they have success.
The learning to self edit has been in her IEP for the last 3 years. And she continues to make improvements, but still has difficulties. I pointed out to the teacher that usually all the letters were there, just in the wrong order. This is typical of ADHD spellers.(according to her doctor) I also pointed out that she misspells the words differently everytime - also common for ADHD.
We have been lucky, the teachers have really worked with us to make her successful. She went from struggling to be average to honor roll! Encourage your daughter to learn how to type - then she can use the spell checker - and you have to teach them how to choose the right word from the list.
I bought our daughter a small pocket spell checker that corrects phonetic spellings. She improved her phonetic abilities by using it and took it to school every day to help her spell. When she was too tired to write her homework (too stressful), I scribed for her. She dictated and I typed into the computer. Then she had to spell check it for my typos. I told her teachers that I would scribe for her when needed. But by both of us using the computer, they didn’t know what she did and what I did. AS time has gone by she does more of the typing.
Good Luck. If I find any more, I will let you know.
S