Letter & Number reversals in a 9yo

ellee

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I have a bright 9yo who reads endlessly. However her spelling and writing are atrocious and include very persistent letter and number reversals including the first letter of her own name.



I assumed she would grow out of it as she is such a big reader. But she does not seem to notice her mistakes.



It is becoming an issue at school and I am looking for recommendations for resources I could use to do some work with her at home to try and help her master at least the reversals and spellings.



I've been browsing Twinkl but I would have to pay, is there anything free? Or have people used the Twinkl and found them good? I don't want to pay and find they have 5 relevant sheets!



Has anyone used apps? Is it worth using apps to try and correct these issues?


Any help appreciated. Thank you.

Murple

Have you considered dysgraphia or even dyslexia?
The first thing I would do is watch her writing and see how she forms her letters. Is she doing cursive writing? Cursive writing can reduce the amount of reversals as well as help with spellings.
Another thing would be to see what letters she reverses and focus on one or two in each piece of work. Get her to draw the letter in the air to help develop large muscle memory. Trace it on the table with her finger, trace a plastic letter and write it over and over to get the correct shape into her hand. Then with a piece of work, give her a letter tile with the letter on it and get her to do a search of her work to see that the letter is the right way round.

What kind of spelling mistakes is she making? Is it in small, in every sentence kind of words, everyday regularly used ones or is it when trying to spell once off kind of words?
There are loads of thing to print on Twinkl but it is expensive. Next to nothing is free anymore. SNIP is a free to print programme if her spelling issue is high frequency words.

ellee

Thanks Murple. I'll try those.

It may well be dyslexia, her brother has severe dyslexia and my husband had learning difficulties in school. He said last night he reversed his letters into secondary school. For my daughter I want to focus on improvement over the next few months and reassess maybe in February/March. If we are all still struggling to help her improve at that point, we will probably get her assessed.

She is only beginning to learn cursive and the teacher did say it might help. Her written work is hard to read as she tends to spell phonetically. So you have to sound it out in your head to figure out what she is trying to say. Dead = ded for example. Or she might leave out random letters - present = pesent Teacher said even when she is transcribing, she will make errors and not notice them.

So twofold really, we want to improve her reversals and we want her to pay more attention herself to her own written work.

byhookorbycrook

Start by ruling out the obvious , hearing and vision. Twinkl isn’t really what you need, you can do loads that will meet her needs more than a generic and costly work sheet factory! If there is already a history of dyslexia in the family , she probably has dyslexia too.

Read to her , read with her , develop her comprehension skills through retelling you the story in her own words , predict what will happen next , get her to “ read on” if she gets bogged down in a word while reading.

Is she in 3rd? “Toe by Toe “, if she has a good IQ at that age could be worth trying , it’s multi sensory and whilst it’s lacking in “ bells and whistles ,” tying it to a small reward system can also work wonders .
The book uses “ bat before the ball” for b/d discrimination, but I find “ b with the belly and d with a diaper “ really helps .

Analysis of her written work and the selection of target spellings of words she uses very often is better than any commercial set of worksheets .

Most people dealing with dyslexia strongly recommend that the child learn to touch type and use assisted reading apps.

Is she attending for literacy support ?
On my phone at present but will get some bits to you tomorrow if you like .

ellee

Thing is she reads loads. And she is very articulate. I would say she is a confident reader.

We did Toe by Toe with her brother (ongoing) but we just don't get a sense that is what she needs.Though I might get her to read aloud to me a bit actually so I can double check that she is reading it correctly and not picking up meaning from overall context.

She does have glasses actually, she was complaining of headaches last year. She rarely actually wears them however.

I downloaded some number search type things (numbers hidden in a square full of very similar shapes) as she said she wanted to work on her number reversal first. She made only 1 mistake on the first one. She did say it helped a lot to have the correct one on the top. Maybe I should hide that when we do them?

I've bought a Which Way book online also, but not here yet. I note what you say, I just find it easier to know what to do if I have something telling me what to do! I'll go through her copies and see what needs targeting.

Thank you for replying, anything else you think I should look for or do, please do let me know.