Gifted reader spelling trouble...

[Esse Quam Videri]

Dd11 taught herself to read at age 4. She was reading chapter books in K and has kept up reading advanced selections (ambleside, etc) since then. She absolutely loves to read and her comprehension and analysis are really good. Her spelling, however, has always been a problem.

 

Once we really noticed the issue (around 3rd grade) we tried some phonics/spelling remediation with AAS 1-4. She then went to a classical private school that used Spalding for reading/spelling, and within the year she had tested out of high school spelling (passed all tests and memorized all spelling rules) and no longer had to take the spelling class.

 

She can easily memorize spelling words short term for a weekly test but they don't stick and stay with her. She also has a lot of trouble sounding out new words and mispronounces a lot. She reads the words and knows what they mean because of her context exposure but can't actually say then correctly. In a recent free write exercise, she misspelled available, vacuum, luxurious, mysterious, littering, and management.

 

What would you do? I'm thinking more reading aloud together. We also do dictation exercises daily, but I'm not sure what spelling program we should be doing, or if there is some other way to work on these skills. We currently have Spelling by Sound and Structure 6, but I'm honestly not too enthusiastic that it'll make a difference. Thoughts?

Edited January 6, 2016 by Esse Quam Videri

[908874]

You may want to post this on the accelerated learner board as well.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Reefgazer]

I've got one just like this.  It's been a battle, let me tell you.  But her spelling and applying her spelling rules has improved (e-v-e-r- so-s-l-o-w-l-y and over time) with Rod and Staff.

Dd11 taught herself to read at age 4. She was reading chapter books in K and has kept up reading advanced selections (ambleside, etc) since then. She absolutely loves to read and her comprehension and analysis are really good. Her spelling, however, has always been a problem.

Once we really noticed the issue (around 3rd grade) we tried some phonics/spelling remediation with AAS 1-4. She then went to a classical private school that used Spalding for reading/spelling, and within the year she had tested out of high school spelling (passed all tests and memorized all spelling rules) and no longer had to take the spelling class.

She can easily memorize spelling words short term for a weekly test but they don't stick and stay with her. She also has a lot of trouble sounding out new words and mispronounces a lot. She reads the words and knows what they mean because of her context exposure but can't actually say then correctly. In a recent free write exercise, she misspelled available, vacuum, luxurious, mysterious, littering, and management.

What would you do? I'm thinking more reading aloud together. We also do dictation exercises daily, but I'm not sure what spelling program we should be doing, or if there is some other way to work on these skills. We currently have Spelling by Sound and Structure 6, but I'm honestly not too enthusiastic that it'll make a difference. Thoughts?

 

[forty-two]

The words you said she misspelled are mostly base words+prefixes/suffixes - was her mistake in spelling the base word, or in correctly adding the prefix/suffix? Megawords is for her age range - it teaches spelling through teaching how to add prefixes and suffixes to base words, and it's supposed to be good at building up missing skills in breaking words into syllables - people improve their reading and pronunciation as well as their spelling. That might be a program to look into.

She absolutely loves to read and her comprehension and analysis are really good. Her spelling, however, has always been a problem.

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She also has a lot of trouble sounding out new words and mispronounces a lot. She reads the words and knows what they mean because of her context exposure but can't actually say then correctly. In a recent free write exercise, she misspelled available, vacuum, luxurious, mysterious, littering, and management.

 

What would you do? I'm thinking more reading aloud together. We also do dictation exercises daily, but I'm not sure what spelling program we should be doing, or if there is some other way to work on these skills. We currently have Spelling by Sound and Structure 6, but I'm honestly not too enthusiastic that it'll make a difference. Thoughts?

The bolded is me and my entire family - voracious readers, and our ability to correctly pronounce words we learned in our reading is next to nil. Dd9 has that plus major spelling trouble. For us, this was due to low phonemic awareness - particularly difficulty blending and manipulating sounds - which caused difficulties with applying phonics knowledge. (Phonics knowledge describes the connection between written language and spoken language, and since our oral language skills are shaky, we're correspondingly limited in how we can apply them to written language.) My family's *really* bad here - my dds both failed the Barton pre-screening (which measures whether a student has enough phonemic awareness skills to be able to learn to read phonetically), although my older dd was in fact already reading voraciously in spite of that. But you don't have to be *that* bad to have a few struggles.

 

Anyway, things that are helping here:

*REWARDS reading - it teaches all sorts of helpful skills: orally blending syllables together, breaking multisyllabic words into parts, reviewing multi-letter vowel phonograms, and reading long words using morphographs (breaking words into base words and added prefixes/suffixes). I got an old edition used on amazon for under $20 for teacher's edition and student book combined.

 

*Using the sound pictures from Dekodiphukan (Decode-if-you-can) to practice/remediate blending. Dekodiphukan is a free reading program, available for downloading/printing and as a series of iPad apps, that teaches reading through intuitive sound pictures (for example, there's a buzzing bee for /z/ and a girl eating yummy honey for /m/). Eleven's a bit old for the rhyming story that introduces the sound pictures, but my already-reading oldest enjoyed it, as well as the puzzle aspect of decoding words written in sound pictures. She's learning cursive and covertly remediating blending skills by writing words that are written in sound pictures - I'm writing up all the words in her old reading program (current reading program for my middle) in sound pictures, so she is forced to learn them phonetically. (I taught her via phonics, but as it turned out she didn't have the PA skills necessary to learn to read via phonics, and she ended up reading mostly by sight, haphazardly applying her formal phonics knowledge to decoding unfamiliar words, with high success when the word is in her oral vocabulary, but with iffy success when it isn't.)

 

*Spelling You See's visual marking system. Dd9 isn't good at breaking wholes into parts, so she doesn't perceive the details of the words when she reads and so doesn't learn to spell that way, and with her iffy PA skills, she can't orally break the word down and spell it that way. Marking words with SYS's color-coded system (yellow for multi-letter vowel phonograms, purple for r-controlled vowels, green for y-as-a-vowel, blue for multi-letter consonant phonograms, orange for silent letters, and red/pink for prefixes/suffixes (we've added brown for blends, because dd9 can't break them down to save her life)) has done wonders for getting her to focus on the individual parts of the word and learn them. IDK if this would be much different than the Spalding marking she already knows, though.

 

ETA: We do studied dictation, where I have her mark up the passage with the SYS markings (Spalding markings would work, too) and copy it one day, and the next day have her study the marked-up passage and then dictate it to her.

Edited January 7, 2016 by forty-two

[EmilyGF]

How about the adult version of Sequential Spelling? My super-fast reader really hated rules-based spelling but has enjoyed Sequential Spelling. It isn't about memorizing a list but using suffixes and prefixes along with base patterns to build various words. 

 

I find that the right spelling program teaches a kid to notice spelling so that they (at least my kids) improve in general on words they haven't covered. My oldest thrived on rules, second, not so much.

 

Emily

[ElizabethB]

My online spelling lessons, the nonsense words coupled with the rules should help.

 

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Spelling/spellinglessonsl.html

 

You might also want to try a few extra nonsense words and a bit of Webster's Speller when you finish.

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Same issue here...apples and pears by promethian trust has really helped! She is a much better speller and better at new words. This year I am also teaching her to type like as in- it's a HUGE priority. This will help her so much! :) but it's great for her to have a good starts with the basics. Apples and pears has given her that.