Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Spelling

So what is with the spelling? DD scored in the 99.9th in verbal, reads well, has strong vocabulary knowledge yet can't spell well.

And talking with another mom, whose young son is DYS, spelling is also an issue. And then I just read a post and spelling also came up.

Is that a VS gifted thing?

Or an abberation? (I vote VS as I had to think to spell abberation and still not sure if I got it right.)

Ren

DD8 CAN spell if she slows down long enough to try. She says that it is hard enough for her hand to keep up with her brain as it is... if she slowed down any more to think about spelling than she would miss all of her good ideas.

I stopped fighting with her once she told me that. LOL!

I don't think it is necessarily a gifted thing. Some people here and elsewhere report that their kids can spell well off the bat, due to recall-- this may be linked with the way many gifted kids learn to read, by memorizing whole words, although it would take closer to perfect recall to not only identify known words but be able to also recall the spelling.

My son is verbally as well as visually-spatially advanced and doesn't seem to have much trouble spelling, although he doesn't have instant recall of every last word he's glanced at. But he seems to have a good handle on phonetic rules in English, which is bound to help in encoding as well as decoding. DS5 has plenty of frustrations in output right now, but mostly with slowness of writing and typing, etc.

I guess some gifted kids might be slower to spell if they can't remember the exact spelling for a word easily, are whole-word memorizers by nature nonetheless, and haven't internalized many of the encoding rules so can't get help there. I can see how that could get frustrating, and fast.

DS and DD read 3rd or 4th grade level book before entering K. They hardly spelled any word at that time. One reason could be I had never taught them phonics system in US because I had never learned that. They just remembered the words and didn't pay attention how to spell them. DS picked up spelling quickly after few months in K. Recently he scored 99.6th in WJ-III spelling subtest but he only scored high average in verbal of WISC. DD6 is gradually improving spelling skills while writing journal everyday in school. Ren, I remember your DD is in my DD's age so don't worry about that. In my son's case, verbal ability on IQ test dose not reflect his spelling ability. When your DD learned how to learn spelling efficiently, she could improve in flying speed.

I think it is a VS thing. Obviously, nothing can be a hard and fast rule, since you'll always have exceptions but both my mom and myself are pretty VS and we're both poor spellers (thank God for spell check!). DH, on the other hand, is on the audio-sequential side and a wonderful speller (he likes to claim he never spelled a word wrong until he learned English :D).

Not sure, DS6 is very VS, but is an awesome speller and has always just known how to spell everything. He just recalls and remembers pretty much whatever he looks at, or usually figures it out phonetically. It has always been quite strange to me. So, not sure what the correlation is.

Being a "speller" is an interesting experience. I have always been able to spell anything once I see and hear a word. If I hear a word, I have to know how to spell it - including names. When I speak, I see the words in my brain while I am speaking.

I have known really intelligent people who are not fantastic spellers. They usually know the basic rules and spell correctly for the most part, but don't have the interest in words that I have.

Since you mention interest, I'm thinking that's part of the not-so-stellar spelling of my DS6. I don't think he sees the point of it. He was a very early reader, and so I assumed that when he started spelling (which he refused to do until kindergarten) that he would recognize that a word looked wrong if he wrote it wrong. Nope.

I've always been a pretty decent speller. I do notice if things don't look quite right.

Isn't it funny how they can't recognize the wrong spelling? Linda Silverman et. al. claim that yes, many VS people are poor spellers. This is counter-intuitive to me since they could see the word in their head...

It is definitely not a gifted thing as many gifted kids are good spellers and many are awful spellers.

As a VS, I rarely see words in my head in recall, I see pictures, moving of the events. I translate very quickly into pictures. Words are not a strong means of recall for me.

Ren