In our house, the cognitive load of moving the pencil is sufficient to make spelling practically impossible. Both my kids are reasonably decent spelling orally (that is, near grade level). Writing the word down makes it worse, and writing a word as part of a sentence -even a dictated sentence - makes it nearly impossible.

This was clear with my eldest. Misspelled words would have a vague resemblance to the correct spelling, but would almost certainly miss the central syllables of longer words. Giving her Orton Gillingham services were sufficient to lower the barrier on the spelling side sufficiently so that she could spell despite the cognitive load of handwriting.

For my younger, it looks like we're going to have to reduce the handwriting barrier primarily, and work on OG techniques secondarily. His spelling rarely looks anything like the correct spelling. We're working on handwriting automaticity, but even with that, I suspect he'll need a keyboard ultimately. In his case, his teacher and I just figured out how much of a load it is- multiplication is done at a rate of 1 problem per 2 seconds on the ipad with 100% accuracy, but 1 per 6 on paper with 80% accuracy

Last edited by geofizz; 08/29/13 04:03 AM.