Intelligent daughter - difficulty spelling

CarPark2

I am just wondering if anybody has experience of this.

My daughter is in first year in secondary school. She is smart and works hard.

In primary school, she tended to score well on spelling tests, where she had learned the specific spellings. But she has never really seemed to develop the instinct for spelling correctly. So, outside of spelling tests (which don't happen in secondary school), she tends to make lots of mistakes in spelling words. She reads lots and is very bright, but seems to have a very specific difficulty in spelling in normal writing (but not in learning spellings for a spelling test).

Has anybody else encountered this?

I looked at dyslexia, which it could be, but she doesn't seem to match most of the symptoms for that.

Furze99

I think lots of reading will help with this. Seeing words spelt correctly in their context. So when she writes or types the word, she'll know instinctively that it looks right or wrong. Rote learning is not great, the best learning is done as part of life and in its context.

When you say she reads a lot, what sort of material? Our daughters that age, really got into reading series of books from one author and then the next and so on.

wildwillow

Wouldn’t worry too much as it will improve with time and mindful reading. Not as unusual as you might expect. I found even Leaving Cert students hopeless at taking notes and they expected a print out always.

A solution is to do some dictation and then self correct from the script.

Maybe a paragraph from a book she is reading. It demands listening to the words and the self correcting draws attention to the mistakes. Read slowly enough in short phrases to give her time for each word.

Keep sessions short, max 15 mins. A progress sheet might be and idea with a reward when a certain standard is reached.

But don’t let it hamper her love of reading!!

AndrewJRenko

Switching on subtitles when watching TV can help with spelling. See if you arrange a chat with her English teacher sooner rather than later.

Madd002

There's nothing wrong with her, she's probably spelling as she sounds some people are just bad at spelling. My son 13, atrocious at spelling, writing letters backwards and scribbled writing. I asked at PT meeting last year did he have dyslexia They said no hes not dyslexic, told me as long as he can read what he wrote that's fine with them. This year he got 80% in English test before PT meeting, they showed it to me and it had all the mistakes as outlined above but teacher said she could understand it even though spellings were wrong.

SnowyMuckish

I wonder what method did she use to learn her spelling lists? Maybe she was a very good visual learner or good at learning by rote which would work very well in the short term in an end of week test.

To commit spellings to a longer term memory understanding how specific spelling and phonic rules work help retain the knowledge rather than depending on rote/visual learning.

If she can identify what areas/rules she struggles with there are some amazing YouTube channels that teach these rules very clearly. They are geared at a younger audience but no harm if she doesn’t mind that.

Top recommendations:

Nessy spellings (specifically aimed at teaching spelling rules to dyslexic children)

Kid vs phonics

Phab phonics

Other area to focus on is the Dolch list. These are the 220 most common words in the English language, a lot of which are tricky words that don’t follow any rules. Mnemonics are great here.

Some of my favourite mnemonics to use:

was: worm are silly

they: two hippos enjoying yogurt

here: hairy elephants run everywhere

because: big elephants can always understand small elephants

etc

CarPark2

Thanks for all the responses. She reads books constantly (long novels), so if reading was going to help on its own, i think it would have done so by now.

It is starting to hamper her at school. She was marked down in her Irish in school for spellings, even though she knew the words. She is doing two other languages, so the spelling is likely to cause a problem for her.

Her brothers learned to read using jollyphonics. I can't remember the name of the programme our daughter followed, but it definitely took longer than jollyphonics.

I'll look into the suggestions above.

shesty

I was going to say (but I think you're doing it already), don't assume it will get better or that it doesn't matter.As you say it will begin to affect her, but fact is that I have seen in my own life how something like that can affect people as they move on through their career.

I honestly don't know if your daughter has dyslexia or not but I do know I have 2 separate friends whose kids are bright kids, hard workers, but are dyslexic and the specific problem is the spelling.These kids read a lot, their reading is fine but their spelling is noticeably poor, age 8 and 11. It just so happens that it was picked up for one, by a parent who is dyslexic, and for the other, by a teacher who has a dyslexic child themselves, so it has been identified early and is being worked on.

I'd go down the route you are going and just watch and see the outcome.If it isn't improving, I'd maybe speak to the school or see your GP for ideas , or check out the Dyslexia Ireland site and see can anyone guide you about what might be going on.

witchgirl26

OP I was always the one getting 10/10 in spelling in primary school, read so many books that the library gave me an adult lending card so I could take out more books & I am still terrible at spelling at times. Somethings flow easily but honestly I just am not good with it. For the spelling tests I was able to focus on the spelling itself but if I was writing something, I'd often make errors as I was focusing on what I was writing rather than the spelling of the exact words.

It's worth checking for dyslexia but just so you know, it could just be that she's not good at spelling. I was checked & nothing came out of it.