Help me diagnose this spelling issue...and figure out what to do

[wendyroo]

My youngest straddles the line between first and second grades. She will be turning 7 in a couple weeks. She is a voracious reader who can fluently and expressively read at about a 5th grade level.

She is most of the way through All About Spelling 1, and in some ways she is doing well. She has excellent phonemic awareness, can break words into syllables, knows the rules for starting words with c vs k, doubling consonents at the end of words, etc. With 100% accuracy she can spell CVC words and initial and final blends with short vowels.

But it all falls apart as soon as she starts spelling anything beyond single syllable, short vowel words. Her spelling attempts are almost always phonetically reasonable (olsoe for also, babee for baby, etc), but even after years of reading she doesn't seem to have any grasp on how words should look. And even after intensive teaching and memorization focused on even one individual word, she can't remember from one minute to the next how to spell it. This morning we literally spent 30 minutes working with the word "very": spelling it out loud, writing in on paper/whiteboard/sand tray, typing it on a keyboard, singing the letters, building it with magnet letters, forming the letters with our body. Immediately after our activities she could spell it correctly out loud, but when I asked her to write it half an hour later she wrote "varee"...and I died a little inside. 😉

For now I have paused All About Spelling and have been doing a "traditional" spelling program I found on Teachers Pay Teachers: new list of related words each week, lots of activities writing and interacting with the words, spelling test at the end of the week. The first week was a review of short vowels and blends, plus the "sight words" would, very, your and its. She knew all the blends, plus its to start with, she missed the other sight words and the r-controlled "first" at the beginning and still didn't know them at the end of the week. Second week was worse because it was a review of silent e and "ee", "ai" and "oa" vowel teams plus sight words "around", "don't" and "right". By the end of the week she could accurately spell 5 of the 12 words. This week we tried that second list over again using new techniques, and on the most recent test she now knows 4 of the 12 words. Sigh.

I need a new plan. I don't feel like I can completely give up on spelling...she doesn't need to be a great speller, but a girl needs to be able to spell "your" and "very" and other ubiquitous words. But, on the other hand, I don't want this to kill either of our spirits. Any suggestions?

[Ellie]

Spalding. It is more comprehensive than AAS, and you only need one book--the manual, Writing Road to Reading--and a set of phonogram cards, and you're good to go forever.

[wendyroo]

9 minutes ago, Ellie said:

Spalding. It is more comprehensive than AAS, and you only need one book--the manual, Writing Road to Reading--and a set of phonogram cards, and you're good to go forever.

What method does Spalding use to help kids memorize words that could phonetically be spelled in multiple ways?

[Terabith]

Oh, you have my youngest!

I love Spalding, and I'm a trained and certified Spalding user, but I don't think it's going to do anything that All About Spelling didn't, and honestly, I think AAS is more systematic and takes tinier steps than Spalding does.  

My youngest spells every word completely phonetically, and she always follows the rules.  She was diagnosed with "disorder of written expression" for her inability to spell.  She completed all 12 levels of Wilson.  She has very poor working memory and no visual memory and is completely incapable of choosing the correct spelling of a word that can phonetically be spelled in many ways.  The event that prompted our neuropsych visit was when she was seven, we spent a week trying to learn to spell the word "of."  We literally did 10,000 repetitions.  We spelled it orally while jumping on the trampoline.  We played hopscotch spelling it.  We rainbow wrote it, made it out of clay, wrote it in salt, wrote it in chalk on the driveway, sculpted it out of cookie dough and baked it.  We did 1000 repetitions in many, many modalities in many, many sessions each day for ten days.  At the end of those ten days, I asked her to spell of, and she wrote, "uv." 

She was born in the wrong era.  She spells like she's writing in Middle English.  She'd have been fine in some world without standardized spelling.  She's been in brick and mortar school since age 9, and every year, her teachers are worried that they'll be unable to read her writing, but nobody has had any problems, once they realized it's completely phonetic.  

She's currently 17 and getting A's in AP US History and Environmental Science.  

But, on a good day, she spells on a third grade level.  She has never learned to spell the most common Dolch sight words.  We worked very, very hard over many, many years, and it just is never going to happen.  She completed all 12 levels of Wilson Reading System.  She knows the rules forwards and backwards.

She has read on a college level since about age 10, and above grade level since about age 8.  She did have a very hard time learning to read, but once she grasped it, she quickly went from Henry and Mudge to able to read anything.  Her vocabulary and comprehension has always been incredibly precocious, which I'm sure helped her become a solid reader.  

Around age 12, we stopped trying to teach her to spell and switched to just accommodations.  She uses word prediction software for a lot of texting and social media.  She utilizes spellcheck and an editor for any major assignments (papers, essays) to catch things spellcheck won't.  She's been very successful with accommodations.  Her phone has automatic changes for the way she spells many common words programmed into it.

At seven, I'd totally keep trying to teach proper spelling.  I would continue AAS.  It's a solid program.  But I'd be prepared that there's a possibility that she may never be able to remember which way to spell words that can phonetically be spelled multiple ways.  

If money isn't an object, and you have a good vision therapist near you, that's an option that we did not successfully try.  We tried to do vision therapy monthly with an optometrist two hours each way away, but it did not work.  We weren't doing the ideal program, but he also said she was not making any progress but that if we stopped, despite the full fledged ptsd she developed doing his program, that she would be in jail as a juvenile delinquent.  He was not a good choice.  

[Not_a_Number]

I don't have any personal experience with this and I know Terabith does, but I do have a quick question: when she reads, do you know if she sounds things out or does she do something more cohesive? 

I've also heard of lots of people on here who find that spelling is better when done in context, when she's actually doing her writing. Otherwise, spelling in a program can become totally disconnected from the actual experience of spelling. (Plus, it gives proportionally larger chances to review common words, since you keep coming back to them.) 

[wendyroo]

15 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:

I don't have any personal experience with this and I know Terabith does, but I do have a quick question: when she reads, do you know if she sounds things out or does she do something more cohesive? 

I've also heard of lots of people on here who find that spelling is better when done in context, when she's actually doing her writing. Otherwise, spelling in a program can become totally disconnected from the actual experience of spelling. (Plus, it gives proportionally larger chances to review common words, since you keep coming back to them.) 

She reads a fair number of words by memorization. She will often read "thought" as "though" and those types of substitutions. However, she 100% can sound out words; the other day she read the word "histoplasmosis" correctly despite never having seen it before, and I could hear in her pronunciation that she was tackling it one syllable at a time.

She loves writing stories, but has given up doing it by hand because it is so frustrating. She has to put so much thought into writing every single word, and yet when she goes back she can barely read what she wrote since the spellings are so non-standard. It is kind of mind-boggling. I have been reciting "t-h-e says the" to her since she started reading at age 3 (and before that she would have heard me saying it to her older brothers), and yet in her most recent story she spelled "the" as "thuh". When she has so few words she can reliably spell, I'm not sure how to tackle spelling in the context of her writing. In any case, for the time being I have transitioned all writing over to Talk to Type to avoid spelling frustration souring her view on writing.

[Not_a_Number]

7 minutes ago, wendyroo said:

She reads a fair number of words by memorization. She will often read "thought" as "though" and those types of substitutions. However, she 100% can sound out words; the other day she read the word "histoplasmosis" correctly despite never having seen it before, and I could hear in her pronunciation that she was tackling it one syllable at a time.

She loves writing stories, but has given up doing it by hand because it is so frustrating. She has to put so much thought into writing every single word, and yet when she goes back she can barely read what she wrote since the spellings are so non-standard. It is kind of mind-boggling. I have been reciting "t-h-e says the" to her since she started reading at age 3 (and before that she would have heard me saying it to her older brothers), and yet in her most recent story she spelled "the" as "thuh". When she has so few words she can reliably spell, I'm not sure how to tackle spelling in the context of her writing. In any case, for the time being I have transitioned all writing over to Talk to Type to avoid spelling frustration souring her view on writing.

Do you know if she'd be able to fluently read nonsense words? I have a theory that I don't have evidence for, but I do wonder if kids who are mostly reading by memorization aren't necessarily processing the individual letters as units, at least most of the time. (My younger girl was doing this for a long while.) 

Hmmmm. Well, maybe not so much writing stories, but you could do short dictations and tackle spelling in context like that? You could then also see if continued exposure through writing does get her to remember words more effectively than a program or not, and whether seeing words in context over and over again helps more than just seeing them in a very concentrated way or in books. 

As I said, this isn't something we've had problems with, so I don't have experience. These would just be what I'd try, and if they failed, I'd probably try something else, etc. 

Edited September 24, 2022 by Not_a_Number

[wendyroo]

12 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:

Do you know if she'd be able to fluently read nonsense words? I have a theory that I don't have evidence for, but I do wonder if kids who are mostly reading by memorization aren't necessarily processing the individual letters as units, at least most of the time. (My younger girl was doing this for a long while.) 

Hmmmm. Well, maybe not so much writing stories, but you could do short dictations and tackle spelling in context like that? You could then also see if continued exposure through writing does get her to remember words more effectively than a program or not, and whether seeing words in context over and over again helps more than just seeing them in a very concentrated way or in books. 

As I said, this isn't something we've had problems with, so I don't have experience. These would just be what I'd try, and if they failed, I'd probably try something else, etc. 

Yes, she can read nonsense words - not quite as well as she can read real words, but still adeptly.

One complication is that her speech is pretty severely delayed. She has weekly speech therapy that is working on /sh/, /ch/, /th/, /r/, and enunciation of multi-syllable words. She has no /r/ at all, her digraphs are "muddy" at best, and she still loses /g/ and /k/ occasionally when she is not concentrating on them. She has been in speech therapy since 18 months, is making progress, but her speech challenges have always impacted her reading and spelling.

[Not_a_Number]

5 minutes ago, wendyroo said:

Yes, she can read nonsense words - not quite as well as she can read real words, but still adeptly.

One complication is that her speech is pretty severely delayed. She has weekly speech therapy that is working on /sh/, /ch/, /th/, /r/, and enunciation of multi-syllable words. She has no /r/ at all, her digraphs are "muddy" at best, and she still loses /g/ and /k/ occasionally when she is not concentrating on them. She has been in speech therapy since 18 months, is making progress, but her speech challenges have always impacted her reading and spelling.

I wonder if those are connected? I had noticeable speech impediments as a kid and it never interfered with my spelling... But I can see how it muddies the waters!!! 

[lulalu]

Dictation is what helped my DS cement spelling. We are using Dictation Day by Day a year and half behind. The nice thing about it is that it reviews common words often. We read the sentences together so he can see it first. I have him spell out loud the words I think he will struggle with. The I slowly dictate it to him. When he gets to a word that he is writing incorrectly I stop him and slowly say syllable by syllable the word to give him help. We have done this for the last three school years and the common words are automatic for him now. 

My DS really struggled with spelling and remembering no matter how much he read! It was close to the age of ten that it clicked. When I was teaching I saw 10 being the magic age for spelling to click for a lot of struggling kids too. However, if after six months or so in your situation I would start thinking dyslexia or something else being the issue. I would do a solid six more months of focus with AAS and dictation through Dictation Day by Day. Using oral spelling forwards and backwards. If you haven't already listen to the Andrew Pudewa talk on spelling, he does a great job explain how the brain works. 

[Clarita]

My kids are super little so not even really spelling yet. I've seen a thing around the internet called Structured Word Inquiry. It teaches kids to see the relationship between the meaning of words in English not just the phonics. I suppose in some ways it explicitly teaches why a word might be spelled a particular way, even if phonetically it can be spelled multiple ways or the way it's spelt doesn't make phonetic sense. 

Obviously I haven't gone "all the way" with it, studying it for myself (occasionally I insert a tidbit here and there at the moment for the kids) it makes spelling make a little bit more sense. Essentially it's teaching kids how to look for the spelling patterns beyond phonetically correct like related in meaning to something else, prefixed/suffixed/meaningful combination, homonym so it needs to be spelled differently, etc. 

The tidbits I start with are things like in science if we are learning about rain I might do a thing where I point out "rain" related words like rain+y, rain+bow, rain+boots, etc then we think of what those words mean and the pieces that combine to make them. When we learned counting to twenty we looked at "tw" related words like two, twins, twenty, twice, etc. I pointed out that all the "tw" had to do with 2 or double things. Sight words like here I pointed out where, there and here are related. 

[Lecka]

I think for a lot of kids, once they get to a certain point in spelling, and once they get to a certain point in reading, they pick up those “it could be this way or that way and be phonetically correct” by exposure from reading.  I think that’s assuming that reading and spelling are both going well, I think then it becomes exposure, when things are going well.  

[Lecka]

Without more reasons to be concerned it would be different — but I think in general this is fine for a 6-year-old.  

[Not_a_Number]

1 minute ago, Lecka said:

Without more reasons to be concerned it would be different — but I think in general this is fine for a 6-year-old.  

As a counterpoint, I would assume this is a fairly accelerated and not particularly neurotypical 6-year-old (who's almost 7), and it's also often easier to deal with things earlier rather than later... some things need nipping in the bud. 

[wendyroo]

37 minutes ago, Lecka said:

Without more reasons to be concerned it would be different — but I think in general this is fine for a 6-year-old.  

I certainly think it could be fine for some six year olds, but I find it unusual and concerning in these particular circumstances. This kiddo is very nearly seven, and a skilled, prolific, advanced reader. Probably more importantly, she has grown up in a very text-rich environment surrounded by labels and signs and books, being read to extensively, playing and building with letter and word toys since birth more or less, etc. And it is not just tricky words like “people” that she is misspelling, but short, easy, incredibly common words like “the” and “very”, words that she has read thousands of times, that she really should be able to master through visualization or drill.

Honestly, I would expect an almost seven year old to be able to memorize a completely random string of three or four letters with a moderate amount of practice, to the point they could reproduce it accurately for at least a full day. Six year old minds are generally memorization machines, so the fact that she can’t recite the letters v-e-r-y an hour after extensive, multi-modal practice seems like a red flag to me. 

[Lecka]

https://lindamoodbell.com/program/seeing-stars-program
 

I haven’t used this program, but it’s out there.  

[KSera]

3 hours ago, wendyroo said:

Yes, she can read nonsense words - not quite as well as she can read real words, but still adeptly.

One complication is that her speech is pretty severely delayed. She has weekly speech therapy that is working on /sh/, /ch/, /th/, /r/, and enunciation of multi-syllable words. She has no /r/ at all, her digraphs are "muddy" at best, and she still loses /g/ and /k/ occasionally when she is not concentrating on them. She has been in speech therapy since 18 months, is making progress, but her speech challenges have always impacted her reading and spelling.

I’m not diagnosing, but she sounds like my dyslexic, particularly as far as working on a word and being able to spell it correctly and then shortly after spelling it completely differently.  Mine would spell the same simple word three different ways in one paragraph.  that said, I had two other kids who just took a lot longer to get spelling than they did reading; all of mine were strong readers, even my dyslexic kid, though she took longer than the others.

On the speech issue, it’s a very strong chance that is connected. My kid with a fairly serious speech impairment has had it affect reading. When you’re saying the word wrong, it’s not surprising you and then also spell it wrong. Like “The” becomes “vuh” because that’s how it’s said.  

1 hour ago, Not_a_Number said:

As a counterpoint, I would assume this is a fairly accelerated and not particularly neurotypical 6-year-old (who's almost 7), and it's also often easier to deal with things earlier rather than later... some things need nipping in the bud. 

I would come down more in the middle on this. My kids are accelerated, with a couple of them not  neurotypical, yet some of these things you can’t just nip in the bud just because you want to and are trying. There’s certain things that are just developmental. With my non-dyslexic but poor spelling kids, it really seemed to be a developmental thing. We worked on it diligently, certainly, but a lot of improvement just came with age. Even with my dyslexic kiddo, her spelling is really not so bad at all now as a young adult. It was atrocious as a younger child, though. 
 

I’m a big fan of apples and pears spelling for dyslexic kids. We had more improvement with that than with anything else.

Edited September 25, 2022 by KSera

[Not_a_Number]

Just now, KSera said:

I would come down more in the middle on this. My kids are accelerated, with a couple of them not Nuro typical, yet some of these things you can’t just nip in the bud just because you want to and are trying. There’s certain things that are just developmental. With my non-dyslexic but poor spelling kids, it really seemed to be a developmental thing. We worked on it diligently, certainly, but a lot of improvement just came with age. Even with my dyslexic kiddo, her spelling is really not so bad at all now as a young adult. It was atrocious as a younger child, though. 

I am actually not specifically thinking of even necessarily addressing spelling early on... just seeing if you could pinpoint the issues and then work on those. I'm sure a lot of the time, a lot of the skills are developmental... I'm just a big fan of picking up anything lying by the side of the road, so to speak. (It's the same way as I tend to teach concepts early in math, but don't tend to expect the kind of proficiency that really is developmental.) 

[lulalu]

1 hour ago, wendyroo said:

I certainly think it could be fine for some six year olds, but I find it unusual and concerning in these particular circumstances. This kiddo is very nearly seven, and a skilled, prolific, advanced reader. Probably more importantly, she has grown up in a very text-rich environment surrounded by labels and signs and books, being read to extensively, playing and building with letter and word toys since birth more or less, etc. And it is not just tricky words like “people” that she is misspelling, but short, easy, incredibly common words like “the” and “very”, words that she has read thousands of times, that she really should be able to master through visualization or drill.

Honestly, I would expect an almost seven year old to be able to memorize a completely random string of three or four letters with a moderate amount of practice, to the point they could reproduce it accurately for at least a full day. Six year old minds are generally memorization machines, so the fact that she can’t recite the letters v-e-r-y an hour after extensive, multi-modal practice seems like a red flag to me. 

Everything you have said is very common and normal for her age even with exposure. I taught for many years lots of children who came from very literate families. And most 6 year olds struggle. The exception was a 6 year old could spell very or any word ending in the e sound being spelled with a y especially at the beginning of 1st grade. You might just have the exceptions for your other children. I had students who were reading at 3 or 4 and still in first grade had struggles with spelling as they are very different skills. She may have weak visualization skills, in which spelling forwards and backwards aloud will help with. But nothing you have said strikes me as odd or alarming. Especially considering she is needing speech. This would be where to throw your time and energy at and wait a year for spelling. 

Edited September 25, 2022 by lulalu

[LauraClark]

13 hours ago, lulalu said:

Dictation is what helped my DS cement spelling. We are using Dictation Day by Day a year and half behind. The nice thing about it is that it reviews common words often. We read the sentences together so he can see it first. I have him spell out loud the words I think he will struggle with. The I slowly dictate it to him. When he gets to a word that he is writing incorrectly I stop him and slowly say syllable by syllable the word to give him help. We have done this for the last three school years and the common words are automatic for him now. 

My DS really struggled with spelling and remembering no matter how much he read! It was close to the age of ten that it clicked. When I was teaching I saw 10 being the magic age for spelling to click for a lot of struggling kids too. However, if after six months or so in your situation I would start thinking dyslexia or something else being the issue. I would do a solid six more months of focus with AAS and dictation through Dictation Day by Day. Using oral spelling forwards and backwards. If you haven't already listen to the Andrew Pudewa talk on spelling, he does a great job explain how the brain works. 

I was coming to say just about the same thing. My oldest didn't retain with the list method, but once we switched to dictation it really started to click. He is nearly 11 now and I think an excellent speller. DS8 is still getting a lot of dictation words wrong, but I'm definitely seeing improvement. The ones he gets wrong are usually because he's sounding it out correctly and guesses wrong on letter combos ('ee' instead of 'ea' or 'ay' in 'they'). It does seem that they get a certain age and are fine-maybe just enough exposure to words.

[EKS]

This sounds like either a developmental vision issue or dyslexia, or both.

My son was sort of like this, in that his spelling was rigidly phonetic but wrong, well after his reading was reasonably good.  But he had a very difficult time learning to read fluently, and wasn't a fluent reader until age 9+.

Things that helped along the way were Audiblox, vision therapy, and after he was reading on/above grade level, Sequential Spelling.

Sequential Spelling got him to a 5th grade level in spelling and then he was stuck at that level for like a year.  We switched to AAS and did the first four levels quickly whereupon he informed me that the program made him feel like a baby, so we stopped.  He is now an adult who spells well enough when using a computer, less well when filling out forms by hand.

[lulalu]

This morning I was thinking about this a little more. You could spend some time figuring out if she has weak visualization skills. Drop spelling altogether for a short time so the stress isn't there. Make 2inch square boxes and draw inside them easy shapes. A circle dead center, next one have a line diagonal in the upper left corner, next one two small circles on opposite corners, etc. Have her look at one square at a time and then give her a blank square to copy it in. Also, have her do dictation of the square a few times. That will help you see if she can verbalize what she sees. If this is difficult then it might be she needs visual therapy, glasses, or just needs to work on holding images in her head of what she sees. 

I'm sure you already know, but I will add just in case. Spelling is holding images in our head of the correct spelling as there are many possible ways to spell words in English. So if she can't hold an image in her head it won't matter how much she has read previously. 

 

 

[BusyMom5]

I would switch to daily copywork- read the sentence aloud, write it,  reading each word as she writes,  then re-reading the whole thing at the end.  

I ate a red apple. 

I

Ate

A

Red

Apple

I ate a red apple.  

Use a high frequency word list to be sure you are hitting the same one for several weeks in a row, and reviewing constantly.  If you choose the word "the" put it in every sentence for 2-3 weeks, then skip a day, then go back to it.  I like McRuffy handwriting,  but the price with shipping is crazy!  

 

I started Apples and Pears in about 5th grade.  We had the best luck with it, but any spelling list type program will not work.  There isn't enough repetition.  FWIW,  my spelling trouble kid uses a lot of spell-check and Googling words to make sure shes using the right word (berry vs bury).  Her spelling did improve,  but it will always be something she has to watch.  

[Nart]

It’s an issue with orthographic processing. Some kids just have a really hard time visually imprinting what words looks like when they spell. My son had amazing phonological awareness. He could rhyme at an early age easily, blend words, segment words but could not spell common words such as: they, was, because, any word with a contraction, etc. He often misspelled words differently through one paragraph. He also reversed letters.

The only thing that helped was Apples and Pears spelling. Do a search here and read the reviews. I slugged through 100 lessons with him when he was in third and fourth grade. He still isn’t the best speller BUT he now can spell common words correctly. 

Edited September 25, 2022 by Nart

[Frances]

While my very verbal, prolific, fluent reader son’s spelling issues were not quite as bad as your daughter’s, I did despair for a long time that he would ever have adequate spelling skills, let alone ones that remotely approached his other academic skill levels. I think the two things that made the biggest difference for him were daily dictation and Sequential Spelling. I also wonder if you have asked her speech therapist about any link between speech issues and spelling problems and/or seen if she has any recommendations.

[Terabith]

@lewelma remediated her son who was very much like this using dictation.  

[lewelma]

1 hour ago, Terabith said:

@lewelma remediated her son who was very much like this using dictation.  

Yes, I did. Good memory.  My younger boy was like the OPs-- knowing all the rules, able to hear the sounds and map them to letter combinations.  What he lacked was automation. He had to sound everything out, every single word. Even a word like CAT. He could not just think cat and write cat, he had to sound it out letter by letter. He also could not remember which letter combination was the accepted one for each word - ee, ea, ie, ei, etc. I tried everything, and from the age of 5 to 12 we did 7 different programs including 3 years of SWR (a very intensive approach). Finally, by the age of 12, we switched to dictation. We had tried studied dictation (Spelling Wisdom) where you study first and then I would dictate, but that was not what he needed. He just needed to drill drill drill, in the context of writing, and without memorizing ahead of time. We started at age 12 with The Cat in the Hat because he could still not spell more than half of the top 100 words. We worked for 30 minutes every day. I dictated a phrase (typically not a whole sentence), and he typed. I corrected him word for word right then. Over and over and over. Next book was Frog and Toad.  We did this for FIVE years with ever more difficult books but always ones he loved. And it worked, even though nothing else had.

Now my ds had dysgraphia, so the problems were way way bigger than just spelling. He could not remember how to form letters. He could not understand where a period went, let alone a comma. He could not code mathematical ideas into symbols, and there was no way he could computer code. Yet, he was also gifted in language, with an enormous vocabulary, incredible style, and advanced interpretative skills. So not only did we spend 30 minutes a day on spelling, we spent an additional 2.5 hours per day on writing, side by side on the sofa. Every single day.  For FIVE years. This was my gift to him. And by 17 years old, he won a national writing competition and was published. And last term in his first year of university he earned 3 A+s and 1 A-. 

Sometimes it just takes time. But the key is that your young person has to believe it is possible and enjoy the journey.  Thus, in the end my biggest success was creating the space where he *wanted* to do this work and was excited by his oh so very slow progress. 

To this day, my ds still corrects all of his spelling errors without spell check's suggestion, and studies the proper spelling before moving on. At the age of almost 19, he is still engaged in the effort to improve. And he is proud of it.

Please know that you have time, and that it is a journey. A long one at times, but well worth it. 

Edited September 25, 2022 by lewelma

[kbutton]

I agree with others that it sounds like potentially an issue with visualizing the sounds and connecting it to her phonemic awareness.

On 9/24/2022 at 5:16 PM, wendyroo said:

One complication is that her speech is pretty severely delayed. She has weekly speech therapy that is working on /sh/, /ch/, /th/, /r/, and enunciation of multi-syllable words. She has no /r/ at all, her digraphs are "muddy" at best, and she still loses /g/ and /k/ occasionally when she is not concentrating on them. She has been in speech therapy since 18 months, is making progress, but her speech challenges have always impacted her reading and spelling.

This is really suggestive of an auditory processing disorder (one of my 2e kids has APD, dyslexia, some speech issues, ADHD, and some very specific expressive language issues that are narrow but deep). 

My son's APD therapy ended up helping his speech a bit and his spelling a bit. Sometimes these issues pair up and function like different sides of the same coin. I think if he'd been able to access therapy earlier, it would've made a bigger difference in speech and spelling and made speech therapy less difficult. The screening test for this is the SCAN III, and in her case, I would push for an audiologist that will run the entire test, including the optional parts. 

https://www.igaps.org/ is where you find professionals (sometimes audiologists and sometimes SLPs) who offer therapy for APD (though I don't think that every single type of APD has equally effective therapies).

I think a developmental vision exam could clarify things if she has any visual issues--it's possible for vision to really mess stuff up. 

[ElizabethB]

I would try my syllables lessons, they incorporate spelling rules and patterns and also have nonsense words, nonsense words may help.

http://thephonicspage.org/On Reading/syllablesspellsu.html

I would focus on spelling only phonetically regular words while you try to figure it out. Spelling Plus has good lists, skip any irregular words for now.

You can see the Spelling Plus lists here, the book has them with exceptions and explanations and rules for each list.

https://www.susancanthony.com/ws/_pdf/splhnd.pdf

Book:

https://www.amazon.com/Spelling-Plus-Words-toward-Success/dp/187947820X

Perhaps have a reference page of the common words she misses that she can refer to while writing, in alphabetical order. 

I would compare the reading rate and accuracy of similar words in 36 pt font vs. 12 point font and see if there is a difference as a gross vision screen.

I've had students with speech problems that later showed up in their reading and spelling, it may resolve when that is fixed or may be something else; it could still take extra work and repetition after speech remediation but may be easier.

I like sounds of speech for seeing the videos of how each sound should be pronounced, the app is cheap:

https://soundsofspeech.uiowa.edu/home

 

 

[Gil]

1) Time.

Personally, I'll never again try and teach spelling to a child before 8ish. As much for my own sake as anything else. When the time is right,

2) try color-coding phonemes(?) to create vivid visual impressions of the words.

Also, lot's and lot's of dictation, meaning-based spelling when/where you can and so much repetition that you'll long for the comfort of Arkham Asylum.

3) Stay consistent

My piss-poor speller would've been better off starting spelling at 8ish and staying consistent. We bum-fumbled our way through many starts and stops. It took us a few years of starting-stopping to develop a mix of strategies that helped him, then a couple of years of consistency to get to where he can (more of less) spell whatever he needs to spell.

The color-coding phonic-parts of words was really helpful for him. We drilled spelling shortest-longest words. We started with 'a' and 'I' and then went to contractions and vc and cv words.

We looked at the color-coding and mapped words to that color pattern. He traced the words out in thin-air, wrote them on his thigh or arm, chanted them, made up spelling stories, it was insane. So.Much.Repetition.

Unrelated, but how is she with memorizing other bits of information? How is she doing with math fact strategies? Can she spell her full name?

[PeterPan]

On 9/24/2022 at 7:42 PM, wendyroo said:

I would expect an almost seven year old to be able to memorize a completely random string of three or four letters with a moderate amount of practice, to the point they could reproduce it accurately for at least a full day. Six year old minds are generally memorization machines, so the fact that she can’t recite the letters v-e-r-y an hour after extensive, multi-modal practice seems like a red flag to me. 

Yes.

So in our house there have been discrepancies and they're what you get with the IQ (not as high as your kids, still quite bright here) plus the disabilities. And rather than picking one, I suggest you say AND and keep saying AND until you've beaten every stone. @Terabith wisely suggested several. For my dd visual memory was a piece. For my ds, the auditory processing of language was an issue DESPITE having thorough work done by me with many levels of Barton and despite him reading at astonishing levels by 1st grade. Given the speech issues (which are another can of worms), I would go back to the auditory processing of language and look for holes. You might want to bring on a 2nd (or 3rd) SLP to target this specifically. https://www.proedinc.com/Products/37614/the-central-auditory-processing-kit.aspx  We currently use three SLPs and each one has something they do exceptionally well. The one using this kit with him had experience in the deaf community.

Also, if she's having significant speech challenges, working on spelling might be a brain distraction for her. You might accomplish more by WAITING and using dictation/tech for the time being. Then, when her speech is solid around 12-ish, move over to spelling. My ds had moderate/severe apraxia and needed extensive therapy for years. It seemed he could either learn to read OR acquire speech but not both. The brain only has so much to give, and you have a time window before they become teens and buck the speech therapy. 

Working on auditory processing, ironically, might help her articulation. After we had been working on it a while, my ds began asking about spelling on his own. I'd work all the angles and not assume it's any one thing. Dyslexia, even though they'll use the term, would be an oversimplification in this case, given the complexity of what is going on. It's language processing due to developmental issues and you have to go back and find the holes and then get it able to motor plan.

Have you worked on retained reflexes yet? They glitch language, motor planning, etc. and you might get noticeable improvement working on them.

[goldenecho]

First, I suggest you not give up on AAS yet.   Words like baby that have a y at the end I believe are covered in level 2.   I can't remember whether ai and oa are level 2 or three.  

It goes slower in some ways than some lists do, but those lists teach JUST those words, not the concepts behind those words, and those concepts can be applied to more words.   But words with higher level concepts you haven't covered will be spelled as best as they can be with the knowledge she has...so they won't be spelled right until you actually reach those concepts. 

But if you do go for just "regular" word lists, I would cut the lists down to 5 new words per week (and maybe practice a few review words on top of that).  She is showing you in the testing that that's how many words she can successfully learn by rote.  As time goes by you might be able to grow that, but right now it seems like that's what she can handle. 

 

[PeterPan]

Sometimes a good program is a better program later, after the underlying processing deficits have been remediated.

[Alice Lamb]

Everyone is suggesting disabilities or just too young.  These are certainly possible and not being able to spell one "sight" word shortly after hours of practice IS a red flag.  However, it sounds like she is spelling what she has actually been taught. AAS 1 only covers one-syllable, short vowel words. Long vowels are introduce in the last 3 or 4 lessons, with only open syllables as examples, clearly not intended as mastery.  Not being able to spell words with vowel diagraphs or irregularities is only surprizing because she reads to well.  Many people find recognition (especially using phonics, visual memory and context combined) much easier than encoding.

[PeterPan]

Or we had kids with the issues @wendyroo is dealing with (serious speech/language problems, autism, etc.) and recognize it. Dyslexia is accurately diagnosed before 1st grade per IDA and the challenges of processing issues are obvious. It's not jumping the gun for a mom of many kids and much experience to be concerned with issues she's seeing.

[wendyroo]

Thank you, everyone. Thinking this through and hearing various perspectives definitely helped.

For now I think I am going to stop trying to make any forward spelling progress with her.

I bought her the Squeebles spelling app and entered a dozen short, common sight words (very, one, from, etc) and I am having her play games on that just for fun several times a week. I also bought her several of the Squeebles math facts apps because she is also really struggling to remember those; conceptually she is rocking third grade math, but she still needs to count on to find 3 + 4 (she instantaneously knows sums up to 5, but have to "count on" with even 8+1). 

We are going to pause AAS, but keep reviewing and "hold her accountable" for words she should know. But the only writing she will be required to do by hand is handwriting and copy work. (As a side note, she still writes 5's and 7's backwards about half the time and she had to stop and think about the correct direction for b's and d's everytime she writes them.) I have moved all composition practice to a digital form so she can talk to text it.

We will keep working on speech therapy and let her mature a bit more before we decide if there are enough red flags for further testing. A year ago I was questioning if she had dyslexia because even though she was reading very well for her age (almost 6), she was mixing up all the circle letters, she was reading words with letters reversed and reading sentences with words reversed. And then she turned the corner and rapidly improved to where she is. Maybe a year form now her spelling will be much better...or maybe there will be even more red flags that point to language processing or visual processing or memory struggles.

[PeterPan]

2 minutes ago, wendyroo said:

We are going to pause AAS, but keep reviewing and "hold her accountable" for words she should know. But the only writing she will be required to do by hand is handwriting and copy work. (As a side note, she still writes 5's and 7's backwards about half the time and she had to stop and think about the correct direction for b's and d's everytime she writes them.) I have moved all composition practice to a digital form so she can talk to text it.

Sounds like a great plan! Has she had an OT eval to look at midline issues and retained reflexes? Those can be behind the reversals, and retained neonatal reflexes glitch development of later vision reflexes that build the visual memory. So spelling problems can be an indication of retained reflexes affecting vision and language development, sigh. The exercises are easy and usually take effect in 30-40 days, after which they are dropped, making them not as serious a commitment as some things. There are different systems, but we've had success with Pyramid of Potential and a russian sounding one whose name I've forgotten. We actually had to go back and work on them this year because the puberty thing disrupted his whole system and caused some to re-emerge, sigh. 

When my ds was that age we did a lot of Knex sets and Lego. He'd build them backwards or mirror image, so looking at the diagram and getting that physical check of putting the model to the page helped build some of that spatial sense. Something to do in all your free time, haha.

7 minutes ago, wendyroo said:

let her mature a bit more before we decide if there are enough red flags for further testing.

You are correct that most won't eval seriously for auditory processing of language issues till at least 7. I think no matter what you're going to find "dyselxia" as a term, even if someone uses it (which they do with my ds) an oversimplification of much broader language issues. What I find with SLP testing is that there will be an SLP who seems to have "everything" who focuses on expressive language and the really hard kids. That's who you want to do the testing, even if it's not your regular person. The tests are terribly expensive, so only universities and SLPs who decide it will be their niche tend to own lots and lots of those detailed language tests. 

If I were just thinking out loud, I would say the retained reflexes could be checked accurately now. The TILLs and the SPELT could be run accurately. Your SLP should be running language testing as she goes because she should be working on narrative language, etc. and integrating it into the articulation sessions. Ours was upfront that she DIDN'T specialize in expressive language, only motor planning of speech, and that we had to bring on extra people. Wait on auditory processing, though a basic audiology eval would be good if it hasn't been done in the last couple years. If she's going to turn 7 soon, you could wait and do audiology with the person specializing in auditory processing and have both done at once. It has happened that people thought language and it was hearing loss, so it's just always the thing to cover your butt on, sigh. 

16 minutes ago, wendyroo said:

she was mixing up all the circle letters, she was reading words with letters reversed and reading sentences with words reversed.

That's just neurological immaturity (OT issues, midline, retained reflexes). Dyslexia is phonological processing, NOT vision or OT issues.

[wendyroo]

1 minute ago, PeterPan said:

Or we had kids with the issues @wendyroo is dealing with (serious speech/language problems, autism, etc.) and recognize it. Dyslexia is accurately diagnosed before 1st grade per IDA and the challenges of processing issues are obvious. It's not jumping the gun for a mom of many kids and much experience to be concerned with issues she's seeing.

I guess what I am seeing is a perplexing mix of her being just like my older kids and her being very different. And, obviously, she is a different kid, but all signs point to her being just as advanced as my other kids (which genetically is the statistical probability), which makes some of her struggles stand out very prominantly.

She is a very strong, advanced reader...who still struggles with b/d confusion.

She can accurately break complex words into syllables and encode them using "correct" though non-standard phonics (opportunity as ahpertoonitee)...but still spells me as "mee".

She can add up the price of two purchases (dollars and cents wtih regrouping), and even add tax using the "6 extra cents for every dollar" method...but even after a year of reviewing the coins and their values 4-5 times a week, she still can't reliably pick out a penny and identify it as one cent.

So far none of my children have had "learning differences". Obviously their school work is highly adapted due to their acceleration, developmental differences, asynchronism and mental health challenges, but we haven't dealt with learning challenges. And Audrey's issues could end up falling into one of the other categories as well, or more likely many of the other categories. As with so many issues my kiddos face, I will probably never know exactly what combination of factors/diagnoses/struggles contributes to or exercerbates each issue...so I just have to keep trying.

[wendyroo]

4 minutes ago, PeterPan said:

Your SLP should be running language testing as she goes because she should be working on narrative language, etc. and integrating it into the articulation sessions.

We haven't done much language testing because both she and I agree that Audrey's narrative language is a huge strength - almost certainly on par for her age, and probably a bit advanced. Audrey's narrative language at almost-7 is much stronger than any of her brothers' at this age; right now, Audrey's is quite a bit stronger than Spencer's even though he is more than two years older.

Audrey has strong comprehension skills whether reading to herself or listening to read alouds. She can accurately and succinctly state the main idea of short passages. She can summarize and retell short passages and even short picture books either verbally or in written form. She can include necessary details in a story to allow an unfamiliar listener to follow it (though the unfamiliar listener will only be able to actually understand ~75% of her spoken words). She can write a formulaic but well-constructed expository paragraph, including recognizing what details would or would not fit within a given topic sentence. And using text to talk, she has written some strong fictional stories entirely on her own, including characters, setting, plot, conflict, dialogue, climax and resolution.

[PeterPan]

2 hours ago, wendyroo said:

She is a very strong, advanced reader...who still struggles with b/d confusion.

She can accurately break complex words into syllables and encode them using "correct" though non-standard phonics (opportunity as ahpertoonitee)...but still spells me as "mee".

She can add up the price of two purchases (dollars and cents wtih regrouping), and even add tax using the "6 extra cents for every dollar" method...but even after a year of reviewing the coins and their values 4-5 times a week, she still can't reliably pick out a penny and identify it as one cent.

You notice that all three of those issues involve vision, right? Visual spatial processing, visual memory, and visual memory connected to naming. That's why I was saying to proceed with the OT eval for retained reflexes and midline issues. 

Unfortunately, while the IQ is usually genetic and rather consistent, the retained reflexes and sensory mix seem to vary by the kid. So one kid might skate by or have a tolerable mix and the next might, for reasons we don't understand ( birth experience, quirks of development, whatever) have a different experience. So whether and which ones are retained will vary with the kid, but the results can be dramatic. 

That's interesting how strong her narrative language is. I think I'd still watch to see if emotional components are being included, but it's really a great sign, a great thing. 

Dyscalculia is where language and number sense merge in the brain. They are separate from conceptual math, so someone can be EXCEPTIONAL at conceptual math and struggle with number sense at the same time. While it's tempting to say the coin thing is an indication of a math disability/dyscalculia, I'd probably start with the simpler possibility of visual processing issues due to retained reflexes. They are easy to test and improve quickly with targeted exercises. Then see what's left. Sure it's possible to have perfect SAT math scores and have a math disability, so you're not crazy to be asking. My ds is diagnosed with the dyscalculia and he's that mix of very bright at math conceptually while struggling with number sense.  Naming is more of an autism thing. That's how you start to tease it apart and like you say it becomes more obvious with time. The retained reflexes are the one thing that you really smack yourself on not working on earlier because they affect so much and are so easy to eliminate as a cause.

[PeterPan]

2 hours ago, wendyroo said:

even after a year of reviewing the coins and their values 4-5 times a week, she still can't reliably pick out a penny and identify it as one cent.

Btw, you moved on to something more useful, right? Like give her a debit card and apple wallet and move on.

[PeterPan]

2 hours ago, wendyroo said:

so I just have to keep trying.

Does she have less mental health challenges and therefore more energy for some of this stuff? I don't know, just seems kind of striking how well she's doing. You're doing an AWESOME job. 🙂