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    Joined: Oct 2014
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    Lepa Offline OP
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    My son, who just turned six and started kindergarten this year, is really into spelling. He has been sounding words out/spelling since he was about four but now he's obsessed. He spells most sentences instead of speaking them and constantly asks me to confirm the spelling of various objects of discussion. His spelling is pretty good and he can spell fairly complicated things. Just the other day he wrote a story about barricading a door and he spelled "barricading" correctly. Here is the thing I find puzzling. He is starting to read after years of resisting or lack of interest (he wanted to passively listen to stories) and making quick progress but his reading isn't nearly as good as his spelling. He will, for example, spell "you" in a sentence but if he sees it written he sounds it out. He sometimes looks at a word and seems puzzled but then I spell it out loud and he just knows it. It's so strange to me. I'm wondering if this is common. Or uncommon. Or a sign of something that we should keep an eye on.

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    aeh Offline
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    At this age, and with his cognitive ability, it would be difficult to confidently say that this was or was not a concern. It is not the typical progression for beginning readers/writers, but it's also not extraordinarily rare.

    What you describe sounds like he long ago mastered many of the skills of phonics (in the form of spelling), but has not really practiced reading at speed until very recently. Spelling slows down the phoneme-grapheme (sound-symbol) translation process, just as sounding out words does. He appears to be doing both of those skills at more-or-less equivalent levels. What he hasn't mastered is reading fluency, probably because that mostly takes practice. When he is puzzled at a word, but reads it after you spell it out for him, you are cueing him to sound it out phoneme by phoneme by putting it into a familiar spelling context, and coincidentally, slowing down the process, so that decoding each syllable is not quite so intimidating.

    Most likely, I would expect his reading and spelling to equalize after he has been reading for a bit, and had enough exposures to the decoding process to acquire some fluency skills. There is a chance, though, that he is one of those learners with automaticity deficits, in which case he will need a little extra effort to acquire automaticity. The best thing you can do for him at this point (when we don't know what the actual situation may develop into) is to cue him to sound out words, and practice the phonics skills he has, instead of providing the whole word when he gets stuck. This will push him toward the exercise of word attack skills, instead of memorizing all reading words by sight, which a smart kid can do, but with a significant downstream cost in cognitive efficiency.


    ...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...
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    Lepa Offline OP
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    This is really helpful. You are such an incredible resource on this board! Thank you very much.


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