Barging in here (I'm still new and trying to get the lay of the land) - on spelling, I have been told that if you can spell a word backward, you can spell it forward. I've been using this method with my dd (1st grade; am I supposed to write "DD6"?)
http://www.visualspatial.org/Articles/app2spell.pdf and so far it is working. Of course, this would only apply to spelling test words, but if the theory is correct, then you wouldn't forget the correct spelling of those test words when you went to write the word later on. (alternatively, could the problem just be that it takes too long to stop and think about the correct spelling when the child's thoughts are moving many times faster than they can be written?)
I have never had much trouble with spelling, and I always thought it was from doing a lot of reading. But I know my dd, who has a ton of trouble reading phonetically, reads a lot of words by context, and does not focus on the spelling at the time she is reading it - she's already on to the next sentence.
