My son is finishing up first grade this year. He is in the midst of testing into the GT program (his CoGAT scores qualified him for further testing which will be happening in the next few months). His teacher for this year is the lead teacher for his grade who has 20 years of teaching experience and seems to work with him in detail on things so I trust her judgement that something is unusual. A few times this year she has told me that she's surprised at the difference between my son's reading abilities and his spelling abilities. He's currently reading at maybe a 4th grade level but his spelling is still pretty rough (ie, sqware for square, taey for they, lots of phonetic spelling and skipping letters sometimes). It's not so much that he's a bad speller for his grade level, more that he's a bad speller for his reading level. She said she'd considered putting him forward for further assessment but said she knows they wouldn't recommend doing anything for him since he's reading so well. She basically that she's not worried about him in a 'life achievement' sort of sense but that dyslexia might be a thing that comes up in the future.
Other possibly pertinent information: My son also had a LOT of trouble with handwriting last year and this year. During kindergarten and at the beginning of this year, he was still 'drawing' his letters instead of having a good internalized idea of how to write each letter correctly. He's made lots of progress and looks a lot better but definitely doesn't have 'good' handwriting yet. The other aspect of things is that he wasn't an early reader although he's doing great now. He entered kindergarten knowing his letters, letter sounds and a couple of sight words but put it all together last year. He also has had 3 sets of ear tubes in his life - the last set was during kindergarten half way through the year. His math skills are strong and he's aced all his assessments so far although he still writes some numbers backwards.
I see two possibilities for him - one is that he's got some sort of 'stealth dyslexia' working but he's able to compensate for it in his reading. The second is that since he's had so much trouble with handwriting and hasn't really been reading for very long he just hasn't put the spelling part of things together yet and it'll naturally click in the next year or two. Has anyone else seen a similar pattern in their own children? Is it common for spelling skills to lag significantly behind reading skills or do these things usually develop together? Any tips for helping my son along with this skill?
