It can be exasperating trying to help your child improve with spelling. You do regular practice, you get the week's spelling list perfect and yet their normal writing is still atrocious! The words they learnt last week have gone again this week.
When you know your child is bright, it can be confusing and upsetting. But there is a simple explanation. Once you know the cause of the problem, how to fix it becomes quite clear. The cause of your child's difficulties is almost certainly in how your child reads.
There are two ways that children read text; they can decode each word or try to recognise words and use the context to guess the ones they are not sure of. Many children find the latter option far easier with early reader books, that have small vocabularies and obvious links between the text and the picture. However, if your child's reading is based on sight memory, then his or her spelling can only be based on visual recall too. That is much harder.
As the reading and spelling vocabulary increases it become almost impossible to recall the letters in every word from pure visual memory. So you will see lots of very crude phonetic constructions, like "wortr" for water and "sed" for said.
Often you will find that these children can do well on spelling tests, by memorising the words over night. But a week later they have gone again. That process is often a waste of time and energy.
The ONLY way out of this situation is to change the reading technique used. You must read by decoding to be able to spell well. Once you do, spelling accuracy usually comes very easily.
Spelling is a subconscious process. The more you think about a spelling the more unsure you become of it. When you are writing the words appear almost as if by magic.
So the key to helping your child with spelling is to change the way your child reads. Once your child is decoding routinely you will find that the spelling starts to drop into place. This process takes around 150 short sessions to establish, using a reading environment optimised for practising decoding.
As a nice bonus, you will also see your child becoming a much better and more confident reader as well.
In the early days you will tend to see your child become a bit slower and more hesitant with reading. But the decoding process will become more and more fluent over the weeks.
After around 90 lessons using text with decoding support in place, the decoding ability starts to switch into normal text reading. That is very important because the comprehension cortex of the brain, known as Wernicke's area, is tightly connected into the auditory cortex. So once we fully engage the auditory cortex you will see a much higher level of comprehension accuracy.
This will make a big difference across your child's education, helping not just reading and spelling but every subject, including maths. The whole of school will seem more fun.
When you know your child is bright, it can be confusing and upsetting. But there is a simple explanation. Once you know the cause of the problem, how to fix it becomes quite clear. The cause of your child's difficulties is almost certainly in how your child reads.
There are two ways that children read text; they can decode each word or try to recognise words and use the context to guess the ones they are not sure of. Many children find the latter option far easier with early reader books, that have small vocabularies and obvious links between the text and the picture. However, if your child's reading is based on sight memory, then his or her spelling can only be based on visual recall too. That is much harder.
As the reading and spelling vocabulary increases it become almost impossible to recall the letters in every word from pure visual memory. So you will see lots of very crude phonetic constructions, like "wortr" for water and "sed" for said.
Often you will find that these children can do well on spelling tests, by memorising the words over night. But a week later they have gone again. That process is often a waste of time and energy.
The ONLY way out of this situation is to change the reading technique used. You must read by decoding to be able to spell well. Once you do, spelling accuracy usually comes very easily.
Spelling is a subconscious process. The more you think about a spelling the more unsure you become of it. When you are writing the words appear almost as if by magic.
So the key to helping your child with spelling is to change the way your child reads. Once your child is decoding routinely you will find that the spelling starts to drop into place. This process takes around 150 short sessions to establish, using a reading environment optimised for practising decoding.
As a nice bonus, you will also see your child becoming a much better and more confident reader as well.
In the early days you will tend to see your child become a bit slower and more hesitant with reading. But the decoding process will become more and more fluent over the weeks.
After around 90 lessons using text with decoding support in place, the decoding ability starts to switch into normal text reading. That is very important because the comprehension cortex of the brain, known as Wernicke's area, is tightly connected into the auditory cortex. So once we fully engage the auditory cortex you will see a much higher level of comprehension accuracy.
This will make a big difference across your child's education, helping not just reading and spelling but every subject, including maths. The whole of school will seem more fun.
About the Author:
For greater detail on the causes of difficulty with spelling have a look at our web page on spelling and to see what is possible following the right path, have a look at our feedback on facebook.