spelling question

There are several issues here and I won’t pretend to know about all of them. If it is of any consolation to you, the fact that both of them are reading and comprehending at higher than age levels is much more important than their ability to spell. Spelling and reading are intricately connected and the influence is greater from spelling to reading than the reverse. Your boys have apparently learned to read without attending to the fine points of word patterns.

Think of it this way. We can have 1) good readers, good spellers, 2) good readers, poor spellers, and 3) poor readers, poor spellers, but we almost NEVER see poor readers, good spellers. If children can spell, they can at least get the decoding part of reading.

Now to a couple of possibilities of what you might do. I’d first check their phonemic awareness on simple words. Can they spell 3 letter short vowel words? Are they using letigimate long vowel patterns? Are they aware of the various vowel patterns beyond short and long (au, oo, oi, oy, etc.)? Are they using correct syllable junctures (i.e., do they double the consonant after a short vowel when adding -ed or -ing)? Do they understand and use consonant blends? Do they understand and attempt to use simple prefixes and/or suffixes?

It’s important to look at the types of spelling errors they are making before one can know just where to zero in on helping them. Feel free to email me at [email protected] and I can try to help you work through some of their problems. Grace

I would generally agree with the idea that poor readers are often not good spellers, but I am working with a student at present who is the reverse. Her reading is rather poor, because she is a very slow decoder, and is still often influenced by her history of guessing. However she has thoroughly internalised the skill of segmenting words before she spells, and the slower rate of writing (ie encoding) means that her slow processing is not so evident. She rarely makes errors when spelling single syllable words, or compound 2 syllable words. I doubt she would have the same success on longer words, but reading your comment above I thought it worth mentioning to see if other posters find the same.

I believe there is some research (functional MRIs?) indicating that reading and spelling use different parts of the brain. In any case, I have run across quite a few students who can read many grade levels higher than they can spell, and one student who could spell much better than she could read. In general, I have found that spelling is much slower to remediate than reading.

There are only two spelling programs I have found that help the really poor spellers. The first is Sequential Spelling from Avko (http://www.avko.org ), which is very inexpensive. This program seems to develop spelling subskills that other programs take for granted — especially pattern recognition of letters in words. A daily lesson takes about 10 minutes when working one-on-one.

The other program I really like is Spelling Through Morphographs, available from http://www.sra4kids.com (to the tune of about $200). There is a placement test for this program online at http://www.mcgrawhill.ca/school/schoolGraphics/sra_spellingthroughmorphographs.pdf . A child who does not pass the placement test should work with Sequential Spelling for a couple of books and then take the test again. Once he/she can pass, I like to advise switching to STM because it moves so much faster. Daily STM lessons take 15 to 20 minutes. STM is ideal for middle schoolers, but is used even in colleges for remedial spelling programs.

Nancy

Which book would you start with for a chld using AVKO? I found it a bit difficult to place the student with this scheme.

They start with book one. Book one does not equate to grade one. It has words like eschew in it! I personally wouldn’t use it for kids under about 4th grade unless they are very advanced verbally and in vocabulary.

Janis

Nancy, I’m glad you’ve found two good spelling programs. You might also look at mine: http://www.spellangtree.org — also very inexpensive. It really made a difference in the reading achievement of my first grade students (See Performance Data on my webiste).

I’m interested in those students who are good spellers but not yet good decoders. My experience was that once they really had the spelling mastered, decoding came right with it. Usually spelling skills can exceed reading only the beginning stages of reading. My thought is that those who are spelling very well but not reading need to have a little extra instruction in meshing the two concepts.

I had the odd very visual student who could spell better than read. Not at all common, but it happened.