How can an outstanding reader/writer be such an atrocious speller? And how to help?

[Anonymous]

My DD, 11, is like this although her spelling has gotten a LOT better in the last couple years. While this is a challenge it also has its benefits -- She's a very prolific and imaginative writer, in part because she just doesn't care about spelling. DS, OTOH, struggled with writing in the early grades (and still doesn't like it). His 1st grade teacher pointed out that his problem was that he had a very big vocabulary and wanted to use the words he knew but didn't know how to spell them. Rather than just getting kind-of close, he paralyzed himself because he wanted to spell everything correctly.

[Anonymous]

No advice but my 8 yo DD is like this too. She does okay on spelling tests but her free writing is awful!!

[Anonymous]

I could have written this post about my own 9 y.o. DD. Spelling is slowly improving, but I mostly spend a lot o time biting my tongue to not be the critical mom.

[Anonymous]

English spelling is a nightmare.

I am a voracious reader with a Ph.D. and I cannot spell in English to safe my life. Thank god for spellcheck.

However, I have no trouble spelling in Italian, which I am fluent in.

[Anonymous]

My mother and sister are both phonetic spellers, my uncle had dyslexia. None of the three of them could spell. Spelling tests were always a matter of memorizing the word then letting it go immediately. On the other hand, my father, brother and I didn't need to study for spelling tests, and very rarely had any spelling mistakes when writing. Sometimes it has nothing to do with how hard the the student works.

On the other hand, I'm a tutor and nanny. I've worked with several kids who needed to to taught certain rules (when to double the final consonant before adding a suffix, when to change y to an i when adding a suffix), and they all benefited from games involving the introduced rule. Spelling correctly (for them) was a matter of remembering the rule later, so a certain amount of practice was necessary.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
In what context does your child spell words wrong?
This could make a difference to the type of intervention, if any, you chose to implement.

My 10 year old spelled terribly while writing, but perfectly during spelling tests. He is also an advanced reader, etc.

Due to concerns with inattention, lack of organization and extremely slow processing speed, he underwent a full neuropsychological evaluation, and was diagnosed with severe ADHD (combined type, but mostly inattentive and fidgety, not hyperactive). The psychologist told us that writing is an immense multitasking effort for children with ADHD: they struggle to do all these things at once - put thoughts on paper in a logical way, follow spelling, punctuation and grammatical rules, insert examples and cite sources, etc. So one thing that often gets lost in the shuffle is spelling!

+1 Same situation exactly.

[Anonymous]

It's genetic. I was a very (very) advanced reader and now a college English professor. I can't spell. Can't learn a foreign language (I'm convinced it is a connected gene).

It is what it is. Fortunately computers make this much less a glaring deficit than it would have been 20 years ago, but it still sucks when your brain won't do things other brains can do. Very mild dyslexia may be involved (never diagnosed and never a negative impact on me academically).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's difficult to pinpoint the source of your child's spelling challenges without seeing work samples, but this much is clear: if reading is advanced, then the child knows the phonemic sounds.

The question is, when encoding (spelling), why does she consistently choose the wrong representation of the sound? Logic dictates that a strong reader is familiar with words and their appropriate spelling (including homophones) because the reader is able to consistently connect context with visual cues to correctly decode (read) and comprehend the word(s) in question. So...why does your child fail to consistently apply contextual and visual cues when attempting to write the same words she reads?

Again, this is an educated guess (not having observed writing behaviors and work samples), but I would suggest the following:
--There are 44 phonemes in the english language. Google it, and make sure your child knows ALL of them.
--Each developing speller needs a strategy to use when she comes across a word she does not know how to spell. Teach the 6 syllable types (open, closed, r-controlled, vowel team, consonant-'le', silent 'e') and stress syllibication (an extension of "chunking").
--Stress accountability. At a certain point, it is no longer acceptable to guess. The child must recall all that she has learned and all she knows from visually recognizing words (i.e. reading) in order to take their best shot at the correct spelling.

it is not the case necessarily that a good reader has good phonemic awareness. I know this because the speech language eval showed otherwise for my son.

[Anonymous]

I was reading by age three and reading well by 6 and read a ton. Have never been a good speller. As an adult, I now suspect some of this is hearing problems I had when I was a small child. If you can pronounce a word properly it's harder to spell it.

[Anonymous]

LexiaCore5 can help!

[Anonymous]

I was always a voracious reader and I have a PhD. I was always a horrible speller. Luckily, literally everything has spellcheck on it these days, and it doesn't impact my ability to write documents as an adult.

[Anonymous]

I had a voracious reader who was taught with whole language, an approach that often results in poor spellers. I supplemented at home with Sequential Spelling. See Cathy Duffy's review below to see if it would suit your child. Took no more than 15 minutes a day.

http://cathyduffyreviews.com/spelling-vocabulary/sequential-spelling.htm

[Anonymous]

My DD just did a psychoeducation eval and her verbal comprehension was in the 99th percentile....and her spelling subtest or whatever test it was (don't remember the name) was 13th percentile. This resulted in a diagnosis of "Learning disorder of written expression.". Psych thought there might have been missed dyslexia but DD is smart enough to have compensated in the early years (now is 12) and the dyslexia tests now weren't conclusive. Spellcheck and Grammarly are her friends. I give thanks that we live in this age of technology (for her sake!)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My DD just did a psychoeducation eval and her verbal comprehension was in the 99th percentile....and her spelling subtest or whatever test it was (don't remember the name) was 13th percentile. This resulted in a diagnosis of "Learning disorder of written expression.". Psych thought there might have been missed dyslexia but DD is smart enough to have compensated in the early years (now is 12) and the dyslexia tests now weren't conclusive. Spellcheck and Grammarly are her friends. I give thanks that we live in this age of technology (for her sake!)

What are you doing for your DD now? Had an SLP eval for my DC a couple months ago and phonemic scores were all in that range (highest was 25). It was the CTOPP II or something. Scores 98th percentile on the ELA MAP test though.

We're doing speech language therapy once a month and Logic of English (an Orton Gillingham program) at home. It explains English spelling rules!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ilthoEG39M

[Anonymous]

Dyslexia: which is about manipulating phonemes and not seeing things wrong. 1 in 5 people have it. See this:
http://eida.org/spelling/