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My DD9 has ADHD with terrible auditory processing, and at the moment, she's really being held back by her horrible spelling. Her school relies almost entirely on phonics, and she doesn't seem to hear the phonemes at all. Interestingly enough, she's great at spelling long, complicated words for which she can't even attempt to use phonics, but she mangles very basic words. I should also note that she had a huge gap between her WISC picture span (16) and digit span (7), so she is a strongly visual learner.

Are there any good visual-based rather than auditory-based spelling resources? Do any of you have advices on how to approach spelling for a child with this profile? Everything I've found seems to be phonics based, and that just isn't working at all for her.

Another approach would be to work on her phonological processing skills, such as through Lindamood-Bell LIPS. Or to use one of the programs based on Orton-Gillingham multisensory reading/spelling instruction (e.g., Wilson, Barton, All About Spelling, Logic of English, Reading Horizons Elevate).

EDIT: I mention remediating phonological processing instead of just going with her visual strength because PP is quite responsive to remediation, and because, at her young age, the potential benefit to teaching her brain more efficient decoding/encoding strategies is much greater than for an older reader/speller.

I found several results on google search "visual spelling".

I think your question is very interesting. I did not learn to spell phonics-based, but rote-memory. I ended up using visualization strategies to learn to spell. I often have to write the word down in order to spell, or close my eyes and visualize while tracing out the letters in the air with my fingers.

Perhaps ask your daughter how she remembers the long words, and help her apply those strategies to the shorter words?

Thanks for the suggestions! I'm honestly not sure whether it would be better to remediate the poor auditory processing, or whether it ultimately wouldn't matter, since DD will eventually compensate with her excellent visual memory. I've been hesitant to do too much with a phonics approach, since the school is already doing that with minimal progress, but I will definitely look into the Wilson, Barton, etc. programs.

I'm just not sure what to do with a 9 year old who can easily and correctly spell "toxoplasmosis", but mangles "upon". I'm also not sure to what extent she doesn't "hear" the sounds correctly and to what extent she just isn't paying attention to what she's writing unless she needs to do so. She seems to have no problems at all with decoding, and she's reading well above grade level. All of the problems are purely output/encoding ones.

Hm. Under what circumstances does she misspell words? Is there a difference between her oral spelling, handwritten spelling, and typed spelling? Does she make other writing mechanics errors--punctuation, capitalization, letter formation, spacing? Can she identify and orally correct misspellings when she sees them? Spontaneously? When told to find the unspecified error?

When you spell a long complex word, most people (even very bright children) tend to slow down and think through the word, either using phoneme segmentation (hence, sounding it out) or morphologically (using word roots and affixes). For short, high-frequency words, one tends to rely on automatic skills, which, in the case of someone with ADHD, may be more vulnerable to inconsistent attention or self-monitoring.

I'll also note on the side that "toxoplasmosis" is actually quite amenable to using phonics, as, although two letters are present in more than one of their sounds, it has no exceptions in it.

She will often misspell the same word multiple different incorrect ways in the same paper. So, there really isn't any consistency to her spelling. She doesn't/won't review her work without a lot of prodding, so she won't necessarily identify her misspellings. But, if I circle the misspelled words, she often can correctly spell them.

She does make a lot of the other writing mechanics errors that you listed, too. Weirdly, though, she's almost always correct with her use of the proper homophones. I'm honestly not sure how valid any comparisons between her written and typed work would be, since I have things set up to automatically underline (but not autocorrect) the incorrectly spelled words. She then will just go ahead and fix them.

DD is self-conscious about her poor spelling and generally poor presentation of her work product (she also has very sloppy handwriting). She fully realizes that while she's in the top groups for reading and math, she is definitely not in a high group for spelling/word study. She wants to improve with all of this, but she doesn't know how.

Are you sure she has a *spelling* problem? If she can correct misspelled words on her own and she can spell long words, it seems she is capable of spelling.

ADHD certainly impairs output. My DS10 has ADHD and makes ridiculous spelling mistakes when he is composing in his head and writing by hand. Too many processes going on and spelling suffers. The more taxing the composition, the more grammar and spelling mistakes there will be. My son is very good at spelling and grammar when they are isolated. I am noticing that as he gets better at a type of composition, his grammar and spelling spontaneously improve. When he starts learning a new type of composition, his grammar and spelling appear to regress.

Perhaps reassurance that "I know you can spell because you can correct them" and "your brain has a lot going on when you write, I think it's great that you're putting so much effort into what you are writing." Encourage her to outline to relieve some of the demand on working memory. Encourage her to check and revise her work - you might need to be unconventional if she's resistant. My son despises the writing process he was taught in school, but he's a big fan of the cognitive-process writing process. He learned how to revise and became willing to revise after switching to a different writing process.

I would agree with sanne. If she can correct misspellings and appears to have challenges in self-monitoring/self-editing, including in other mechanics areas, I would suspect that this is more of a function of ADHD-related self-monitoring than of actual encoding skills. Another area worth thinking about is automaticity skills. You report a number of behaviors related to automaticity deficits, which may be related to ADHD or to other learning differences, such as dysgraphia: handwriting, spelling high-frequency words, mechanics.

In terms of trying to isolate spelling from other factors (such as handwriting, organization, idea generation), try having her spell words out loud. That reduces the impact of handwriting. See if she spells better when copying, which removes the cognitive portion of composition. Download some free graphic organizers and try them with paragraph-level writing, which supports challenges with organization, and note changes in the quality of her spelling, mechanics, and composition. Give her a sentence starter, or do a verbal pre-writing exercise, and see if having a jump-start on idea generation and initiation helps.

All of these strategies reduce some cognitive load from writing, but from different aspects. You may be able to tease out which supports help the most, and in what way. This can give you some idea of where the actual area of need lies, as well as which strategies for supporting her classroom success in written language are likely to be most effective.

BTW, how is she with other automatic skills, such as math facts, tying shoelaces, jumping rope, riding a bicycle?

I think she is still deficient in spelling relative to where she ought to be. But, I hadn't considered that the bigger issue might be self-regulation and automaticity skills. She will still misspell words when she's copying a paper in which all of the words are spelled correctly. And while she consistently tests in the high 90's percentile wise on quantitative, fluid, and spatial reasoning skills (from WISC and CogAT), her rote computational skills are at best average. She makes tons of careless mistakes in math class.

I'm still new to all of the ADHD stuff, and I'm trying to figure out how to best help my DD. She seems to have one of those classic stealth inattentive ADHD cases, where she's right at the edge of the mildly/moderately gifted range, is perceived as very bright, and can compensate well enough that she still performs at at least an average level in everything. Part of me feels like I should just chill out, since she's still doing well at school. And part of me feels like I need to do as much as I can to help her now, since the executive function loads will only increase with each school year.

So, I guess over the summer, we will try to focus more on self-monitoring and revising her work. It's going to be a bit challenging, since to her, the moment she writes the final word that she intends to write, she feels that she's finished. And being finished is a big deal to her, which makes her balk at the idea of checking her work.

Has she received instruction in the writing process? That might help her to visualize writing as not being "done" the minute your first draft is complete. (prewrite, draft, revise, edit, publish) There are many charts out there illustrating the process.