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SaraP
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| Posted: Dec 23 2011 at 11:31pm | IP Logged
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My 10yo ds reads at a high school level, and reads a lot, but his spelling is so bad that I can't even understand most of what he writes.
We have been doing copywork daily for 2 or 3 years and Sequential Spelling for at least 2 years. He can copy just fine, his handwriting and punctuation are reasonably good and doesn't miss all that many words when we do the spelling lessons. But as soon as we switch to dictation or he writes something original, every other word is badly misspelled. He even misspells most words when I have him copy a sentence first and then immediately turn the paper over and write it as I dictate it to him.
Any idea what could be going on here? Any suggestions for how to address it?
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ekbell
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| Posted: Dec 24 2011 at 1:05am | IP Logged
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When I was a child in grade three, I could read books several grades level above and couldn't reliably spell three letter words- I could reliably tell that the word was misspelled but not correctly spell it.
What worked for me was a combination of breaking down words into morphemes, learning about their meanings and then brute force memorization of the morphemes plus a spelling dictionary for everyday use.
This took me from an abysmal speller to merely a poor speller.
Basically I need to break down a word into manageable pieces and *study* those pieces to have half a chance of spelling the word.
Then unfortunately I also need fairly continual drill for some time for it to have half a chance of sticking. It really helps if the word is part of my standard writing vocabulary.
Too many new words dramatically the chance of any being learned unless they are related to each other.
Unfortunately even after I was seeing progress, it still took years before I was writing complex sentences without frequent recourse to
my spelling dictionary or other aid (and part of the reason for the reduction was that II became better at replacing words I couldn't spell words I could).
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anitamarie
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Have you looked at All About Spelling? It's really worked here for us. I have one really bad speller who has shown remarkable improvement using this program for the last 3 years. It is Mom-intensive, but you have to decide how important proper spelling is for you in your overall view. It's really important to me, so I put in that time. For others, not so much, it's really up to you. Some decide to just keep on and figure the child will rely on spell-check later in life. I even heard of a teacher who said "Don't worry, she'll have spell-check later." to parents, and the school district in which we are located no longer teaches spelling as a formal subject. They occasionally introduce some word families. So, maybe, first decide how important it is to you, and then decide how to proceed.
Anita
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ekbell
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| Posted: Jan 02 2012 at 2:52pm | IP Logged
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As a poor speller who regularly relies on spell checkers and who also reads a fair amount of amateur fiction online, I feel obliged to note that spell checkers are only as useful as your proofreading.
Without decent proofreading the use of spellcheckers simply leads to material filled with the spellchecker's 'best guesses' which for really bad spellings are often completely wrong (or why I still end up having to make multiple attempts at spelling certain words until the spellchecker finally comes up with the word I meant to write.) 
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ekbell
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| Posted: Jan 02 2012 at 3:17pm | IP Logged
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And after talking to my husband, the former TA, it was noted that it's well worth taking the existence of handwritten exams into account if only for the poor souls stuck marking them  .
Much of the frustration of marking such tests consists of trying to figure out exactly what certain students are trying to say in the first place (on that note my husband still remembers the student who handwriting managed to be beautiful to behold and impossible to read). Poor spelling vastly increases the difficulty of that task.
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Erin
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| Posted: Jan 02 2012 at 10:00pm | IP Logged
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anitamarie wrote:
| Have you looked at All About Spelling? It's really worked here for us. I have one really bad speller who has shown remarkable improvement using this program for the last 3 years. It is Mom-intensive, but you have to decide how important proper spelling is for you in your overall view. It's really important to me, so I put in that time. For others, not so much, it's really up to you. |
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Ditto here too. I have children who read well but spell poorly, actually my dd18 often mispronounces words too. After a year of Spelling Wisdom and a term of AAS I have seen a huge improvement in the spelling of all my children.
Looking back my dc all learnt their basic phonic sounds and then leapt into reading and galloped away, but that didn't help their spelling. Teaching my 7 and 5 year old AAS right from the start I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing what difference they will have.
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SallyT
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My husband has a great spellcheck/autocorrect story from a paper he read (as a theology prof) several years ago. The phrase "momentous island" kept coming up in this paper about school prayer, and he couldn't figure out what the heck the student meant by it, until suddenly the penny dropped in his brain. She was talking about, you know, that legislative compromise where you don't pray out loud at the start of the public-school day, but have a . . . you know . . . Momentous Island.
Moral: you really, really don't want to give your autocorrect the idea that it's smarter than you are.
I didn't teach spelling, per se, to my older children. My oldest daughter is now a college student, and her spelling, which was atrocious even after years of spelling tests in school, has pretty much self-corrected over time, with lots of writing. My 14yo son seems to be an instinctively good speller -- all he did for years and years for language arts was copywork, and both his spelling and his prose style are fluent and strong. His handwriting is another story, and I'm already a little worried about the essay component of the SAT and ACT, where legibility matters, but he does seem to have absorbed good English usage from his years of copywork.
With my youngers, meanwhile, I dither about spelling. We haven't done spelling per se formally as yet (they're in 2nd and 3rd grades), but it does seem to me that being a confident speller is a huge part of being a confident writer, and this is a gift I want to give them sooner rather than later. Nothing says "I am a literate person" like competent spelling and grammar, and I'd rather make this easy for them by paying attention to it now than to try to remediate later on.
A friend did tell me once that the key to spelling is not reading, but writing. Apparently a fast, good reader will glance at the beginning and end of a word, recognize it and move on without taking in the whole word letter by letter. Even doing copywork, I think, it's possible for the writer not to pay that careful attention -- the hand can be writing, and the mind can be somewhere else. I have been trying Spelling Wisdom methods with my youngers lately -- we don't have the program, but I have been having them write sentences with words they tend to misspell. They make up a sentence and dictate it to me; I write it for them to copy, and I have them study it until they can close their eyes and see the words in their minds, before they cover and write. I have a hard time keeping this up consistently on my own, but for my really-spelling-challenged 8yo, that step of stopping to visualize the words does seem to help, and I am noticing improvement in her independent writing.
Just musing . . . I don't know if any of this is helpful at all. Mostly I'm just interested in others' recommendations.
Sally
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CatholicMommy
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| Posted: Jan 11 2012 at 12:03am | IP Logged
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My son is 7 1/2, reads at 7-9th grade reading level and has atrocious spelling. His handwriting is decent though Go figure.
I will definitely take a look at All About Spelling. We've been working through various Montessori word lists, trying to practice spelling that way; and we've done some "traditional" spelling programs, but these just aren't what we need. He would get it all the pure-Montessori way, but that requires more students in the school, and he's a child of one (with a part-time co-op, but we don't focus on spelling there).
Thank you for the suggestion!
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4Real Forums : Language Arts Come Alive
Topic: huge gap b/w reading & spelling levels
