Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Is there a great spelling program for dyslexia?

My DS12 is doing really great in school and as I've mentioned in previous threads, rarely needs his 504.

But the one area his dyslexia/dysgraphia is obvious is in spelling. It is really bad. Fortunately, he laughs about it (and some of the mistakes he makes are truly hilarious), but I think this might be the right time/age/frame of mind to focus on improving his skills.

Is there a great program out there that helps dyslexics improve their spelling? I'd like to have him work on it over the summer.

My go-to would be All About Spelling. It is a scripted OG-based spelling program designed for home use. It does require direct instruction by someone (you or a handy young adult). At his age, he probably won't need to spend a lot of time at the lower levels (there are seven levels altogether), but I would highly recommend going through them anyway, just in an abbreviated form, as there are often odd gaps that dyslexics have, especially in phonemic awareness.

My DS7 is dyslexic/dysgraphic and while he doesn't struggle with reading, it shows up in his spelling. He just started the Wilson program with a tutor recently, and we have already seen changes in his spelling. His teacher sees it, too. You do need someone trained in the program to teach it.

I would agree that Wilson is excellent, and my top cost-no-object recommendation, but you definitely want a certified tutor. Barton is also good, but expensive for the home program. AAS is essentially equivalent to Barton as a home program, and the same idea as Wilson, but scripted (so you don't need the specialized training), and cheaper than Barton.

If you think a summer of intensive tutoring will do it for him, it might be worthwhile to spring for the Wilson tutor, as a trained one-on-one should be able to make the accelerated personalization adjustments easily enough to provide quick but comprehensive coverage of most spelling rules, zooming in to spend more time on trouble spots.

If he has more pervasive spelling deficits, or if cost is a factor, I would go back to AAS, and deal with the customization yourself. One way or the other, the best outcomes will be with someone working with him one-to-one.

Thanks for your suggestions! He did 3 years of 3x/week Wilson tutoring right after he was diagnosed at 7 1/2. It gave him the skills he needed for reading, and probably improved his spelling, but we're looking for a spelling program. I'll give AAS a try, especially since I'm hoping its something we can do between other activities this summer and I'm use he would balk at having another summer of Wilson!

syolbrig, is his spelling ability better when he's just tasked with spelling? I only ask that because my dysgraphic ds still has horrible spelling when writing (even when typing - thank goodness for autocorrect for him!).... but he's never had the issue with spelling as a task by itself. My dyslexic dd, otoh, has had to have a ton of tutoring in spelling. We tried AAS at home and didn't get far with it, but that wasn't an issue with AAS, it was an issue with my dd not wanting to work on spelling and especially not wanting to work with her mom on spelling She's seeing a tutor now and that's working a lot better for her A *long* time ago, when ds was first diagnosed, we consulted with a tutor who suggested a form of visual spelling that didn't require buying a program. It was actually a pretty good system, although I don't remember all the steps at this point in time.

Good luck with the spelling - its' been really tough for both of my kiddos - for ds because no matter how well he knows how to spell, it just isn't something he can think about while writing. He really just tends to automatically spell-check / autocorrect everything now and laughs about all the mistakes that fly through. If only the rest of the world would agree that "the" spells "they" we'd all be much happier (at my house lol). For dd tough just because it takes so much more work to learn spelling rules than it does other kids.

Best wishes,

polarbear

Polarbear, he can do fine on a spelling test if he studies. But then he forgets by the next week. On papers, he relies on spell-check and knows that he's always going to need someone to check his spelling even after spell check. I'm sure he's not going to like working on spelling over the summer-- I'm trying to think of some kind of reward (bribe) to make it go a little easier!

I would echo aeh's recommendation for AAS. We found gaps -- massive gaps -- with DS in level 1, lesson 1. Then it was really easy/trivial through the next level and a half before we found more gaps, after which is was pretty slow going.

We were doing this through the process of getting him ID'd for an IEP at school. So after going through the first 2 levels, he did a lot of the detailed phonological testing. I could very clearly see which parts of it that AAS hit, and what it did not. While he showed huge improvement on word segmenting (AAS teaches this), he still bombed manipulation of phonemes tasks, and AAS does not do very much of this.

DS enjoyed working on AAS as well: I pretty much promised that it no part would ever feel very hard, and that spelling and writing would take less effort if we did it. With those promises (both were true), he dove in with enthusiasm. M&Ms might have been part of the equation as well...

I've heard Apple and Pears mentioned often.

And, btw, the profile geo mentioned is quite common in high-cog and compensated dyslexics: easy PP is okay (segmenting, blending), but hard PP is not (phoneme manipulation like elision, substitution, reversal).