Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Is poor spelling a problem?

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I think we may start with our ped to see if we can get insurance to cover at least some of the testing.


She's able to spell most short words (four letters or fewer), although she occasionally gets the letters mixed up.


No, the school only uses those screeners for kids who are behind in reading.

I forgot to mention that our educational psychologist recommended using audio books. She said that it would allow my DD to expand her vocabulary and satisfy her intellectual interest as we worked on various issues. It was a great recommendation. DD loves audio books and they helped her gain confidence and try harder books when she was ready. She would listen to them first and then read them. It took some of the pressure off of her. She could work on her reading without having to work as much on comprehension. Don't give up on audio books.

I don't think DD would let me give up the audio books if I tried. She loves listening to stories.

MidwestMom, I agree with others that what you are being told by your child's teacher really does't make sense.

While you certainly should push for further testing, I also think you should intervene right now to do what you can at home to help your child. I suspect your daughter may be similar to many children I have taught. Smart, and with a good visual memory for sight words -- for some reason when learning to read they skip over a lot of the phonemic skills and move right into whole word reading. If their K and grade 1 teachers do a lot of choral reading, or repeated reading, these smart, visual learners can really fool their teachers into thinking that they can decode words, so they don't get the instruction they need. However, the initial problems come in spelling, and then later problems hit around the 3rd and 4th grade reading levels because it is just impossible to use visual memory (along with a few letter sounds and some educated guesses and context cues) to read entire stories.

So--- if I were you I would go back with your child now and make sure she is aware of the phonemes of the English language and can blend and segment them. I would not trust her school to figure out she needs this and to try to remediate it for her. they should do this, but I bet you can do it it much more quickly.

As a reading tutor I do this all the time for students and only very occasionally do they turn out to have a true phonemic processing disorder. Usually they were just confused or behind. It is so much simpler just to catch them up on your own. Even if the kids do have a serious disorder, the extra time you spend working on phonemic processing, encoding (spelling) and decoding (reading- sounding out) is valuable and will help your child in whatever specialized therapy will turn out to be necessary.

I recommend you look into this very effective and cheap program:

http://www.abcdrp.com

It has been very effective with many of my students. The creator of the program runs a Yahoo discussion group and is very generous with his advice -- I have found him to be extremely knowledgable. He has also posted numerous additional files and guideas on the Yahoo group for free. They are designed to target particular skills needed for reading in a very efficient manner. I really can't say enough good things about his advice -- it is exceptionally sound.

http://health.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/abecedarian/

If the above program is too expensive I also think you could look into Reading Reflex -- this is dirt cheap and you can probably get it from your library.

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Refle...ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330801742&sr=8-1


Just reading this book and doing some of the initial exercises with your daughter would, I think, help you get a handle on what her decoding and spelling problems are. This doesn't mean you shoudln't also persue additional testing through the school -- but I would also work on whatever you can first, while you are waiting.

Good luck!

OK. This means that she is having trouble segmenting (separating) sounds. If you say "cat" she should be able to segment the three phonemes, separated by a second. /k/.../a/.../t/. Can she do that? How about "ship"... can she segment that into /sh/.../i/.../p/? How about "witch"? Can she segment that into /w/.../i/.../ch/?

What about words with four phonemes? "Slap". Can she segment that into /s/.../l/... /a/.../p/...?
How about "mist", "drop" and "black"?

Next, try words with 5 phonemes: "spend", "crust" and so on. It is vitally important that the child can segment each phoneme... she shouldn't say that "st" is one sound. You need to separate each sound from the next one, because that is how you know what letter to write down.

You can find a simple test of phonemic segmentation in the book I mentioned above, Reading Reflex.

If your child is having trouble with phonemic segmentation, there are many simple activities you can do to help her. It sounds like she already knows her basic code -- the (most common) sounds that match each phoneme -- so that's a great help.

If you need more practice on blending and segmenting and join the yahoo group I mentioned above, look in "files" under "Level A/Blending and Segmenting Work" for a lot of extra practice.


http://health.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/abecedarian/files/

UPDATE: We're seeing the neuropsych in another month. Any suggestions for specific things I should ask for/about?

I'm glad you're seeing a neuropsych.

I'd bring in a list of every issue you see, both in the academic work, as well as anything you see going on in her emotional world, and the interplay between the two. Bring examples of school work showing the issues that concern you and copies of any test scores you feel are telling. It will also be helpful if you could watch her for handedness in the next few weeks (our neuropsych was very surprised to hear how dominantly right hnaded she was -- and handedness is in the title line of the report), included writing, eating, cutting, throwing, kicking, etc. He was positive she must be doing *something* with her left hand. I'm not sure how widespread that issue comes up, but it was a big deal in our meetings. We had to go back and promise to watch for left handedness. (It's non-existent).

If it's anything like my DD's evaluation, the exam was very complete and appropriately focused on the issues, as well casting a wider net to see what else might be going on. We got a lot of very useful data that help explain much of what we see from DD.

First and foremost, we left with confidence in knowing that the work she does is not sloppy and lazy, but instead a reflection of her abilities oddly co-mingled with her disabilities.

Ditto to everything geofizz suggested, plus a suggestion to not worry too much about what *questions to ask* - the neuropscyh's usually look quite thoroughly at a broad spectrum of areas, and you'll most likely find they will ask *you* a ton of questions in your parent interview (which usually precedes the testing). FWIW, you might want to think back through your dd's early milestones and developmental history because the neuropsych may ask specific questions about when she started talking/walking/etc - things like that.

I'm glad you have a neurospcyh eval scheduled - I think you'll find the information really helpful.

polarbear

geofizz, our ds12 (developmental coordination disorder and dysgraphia) is right-handed in everything he does. This was something I was watching for when he was really little because I'm rather severely left-handed lol. DS never showed any indication of the slightest interest in using his left hand for *anything*. When he had his first neuropsych eval in 2nd grade, his neuropsych told us he had "no" handedness and she was really surprised that he used his right hand for everything. We were surprised that she thought we should have known he didn't have a true "handedness". What she was ultimately getting at is that he had difficulty crossing the midline and didn't have a true "handedness" in the sense that most people have, instead he just happened to use his right hand for everything. Later on when he was in 4th grade ds tried writing with his left hand just for fun. His left-handed handwriting actually looks better than his right-handed writing and goes just as "quickly" (quick being a relative term for a dysgraphic kiddo!). Neither hw looks particularly neat either, both look very much like a dysgraphic kid's handwriting.

polarbear

My oldest brother was in third grade when my mother discovered he really couldn't read -- he was just good at guessing in context from the first and last letters. He was taught the "whole word" method, not phonics, and that's what happened.

The others are right -- those "approximations" are way off, and you should find out what's going on and nip it as soon as possible.