Irena, DD's diagnosis was based on a *differential* diagnosis between phonetic processing (including dibels and c-topp - lowest subtest score was 25th percentile, most phonics & spelling scores 30-40 percentile) and her verbal abilities, including her reading. To be clear, in 4th grade, she tested between 7th and >12th in reading (depending on the test - she took 5). The lowest reading scores was on words in isolation, the highest was on fiction material requiring her to draw inference.
Your son's profile sounds similar.
I'd brought DD's spelling up to within range of grade level when she was in 4th grade with Sequential Spelling. It's tedious. We emphasized doing it in a multi-sensory way (my instinct on teaching, which I discovered later to be best practice for kids like her), with color coding roots and endings. It can be done with a DVD instead of a parent, but that appears in make it a tad more passive.
We also started doing all her spelling work for school finger spelling with ASL. We got a lot of the r-controlled spellings straightened out that way by forcing the tactile motion of going from the vowel to the r.
In retrospect, those things helped, but OG solved it. I'm not sure what would have happened had we started SS or the finger spelling earlier. It might have been enough of a patch to prop her up against the diagnosis, maybe not.
Last edited by geofizz; 02/14/14 07:00 AM.
