Good spelling work, terrible spelling otherwise.

[rutamattatt]

My youngest DS (grade 2) is not a great speller. He is a math/science person through and through and not a fan of language arts. I had heard good things about Sequential Spelling and it seemed like a good fit for him, so we are finishing up our first year of that.

 

He does well on all his spelling work. He rarely misses a word. BUT...this doesn't translate AT ALL to any other area of writing he does. For instance, he can spell his SS words fine, but if the same word needed to be spelled for a history test or a book report, he cannot get it right. He is a purely phonetic speller when he isn't doing "spelling" work. I am not sure how to help him connect what he has learned in spelling to correct spelling in other areas. It is like he doesn't know how to spell the word in any different context than his spelling work. Letters are backwards, etc.

 

What am I missing? What can I do to help him make the connection? Or is there any other spelling curriculum that might work better for him?

 

(We were going to have him tested for dyslexia, but were encouraged to let it go a bit because he was a younger boy and the people we talked to thought he would "grow out of it". I'm not sure if that may be a component of this or not...)

[merry gardens]

Spelling on a test with the words studied in isolation is different from spelling in context. It takes more "brain power" to write history tests and books reports, etc. and while his brain is working on writing the content, ability to spell can go out the window for some people! I don't know if that's reserved to just those with learning disablities, but I see it in my child with dyslexia.

 

You might wish to add to his spelling test the opportunity to spell the words in context. If by "he's purely a phonetic speller", you mean that he's misspelling common words that are phonetically irregular, then address learning to spell those common words so that spelling them becomes automatic. Copywork can help with that. Practice, practice, and more practice!

 

You can find a list of the 1,000 most common words and just go through them and test him to see if spelling them correctly is automatic for him or not. While there are spelling programs to help address it, the best ones rely on the teacher or tutor to make individual lists for the child and work on them a few words at a time.

[lorisuewho]

We did Logic of English this year which I felt it did a great job on teaching spelling strategies (AAS, Spalding, etc would all fall in this same type of program). I'm not really familiar with Sequential spelling to know how it works.

 

However, I always found the dictation sentences to be most telling on how well the children were applying these strategies. Next year I am doing a vintage dictation text called dictation day by day (the Modern Speller) to work on only using spelling in context. Each day one sentences is dictated to the child and every 5 days is a review day. Perhaps a program like this would improve the every day spelling instead of focussing on memorizing words in isolation.

[Heather R]

In SWB's writing lectures, she says not to expect spelling skills to transfer to other writing until about age 9. That is consistent with what I've observed with my daughter and other kids I know.

 

I find using a program like AAS gives me the "vocabulary" to discuss spelling with my daughter. For instance, if she spells "smiling" as "smilling", I can first say "that says smill-ing, how could you change it to smiling". If she doesn't figure out her mistake, I'd ask her to divide the word into syllables. Usually then she would notice the closed first syllable and how that makes the vowel short. She would then correct it herself.

 

Hth,

Heather

[PachiSusan]

It's a totally different skill. Spelling for a test simply requires the child to memorize the spelling of certain words. Writing any paragraph or anything else is combining grammar, syntax, imparting the thought, AND spelling. It gets hard to keep them all in the head at the same time.

 

In 3rd grade our daughter was abysmal at spelling. Now at the end of 4th grade that "skill" has turned on and she rarely spells things wrong anymore.

[flyingiguana]

This is pretty usual. It's why I gave up teaching spelling. It didn't accomplish a thing for my kids.

 

They got a lot more out of correcting their spelling mistakes in their own writing. The computer spell checker was also a great tool -- it did not promote laziness at all (turn off the autocorrect, though). They could see immediately that something was spelled wrong.

 

The lack of spelling lessons hasn't hindered my kids at all. They spell just fine now.

[boscopup]

Normal. My son started to transfer spelling to his writing this year in third grade. I do still do spelling with him, as he does better if introduced to the spelling in that subject first, then when he encounters it in his writing, he is able to remember it or at least figure it out. I am a human dictionary for words he hasn't practiced in spelling yet.

[ElizabethB]

I would switch to Spelling Plus and Spelling Dictation by Susan Anthony. It focuses on the most common 1,000 words and the dictation book uses the words you have learned in sentences. The book packs a lot of the words in each sentence. You learn the rules and patterns in the Spelling Plus book.