Phonics is certainly useful, but it only gets you so far with English spelling crazy

My DD seems to have trouble perceiving the order of letters in a word. So for her, separating a word into pieces that form smaller words (which she knows how to spell) helps a lot.

She can learn weather=we+at+her and the order of the pieces as part of a "story".

If I try to teach her, "'weather' has 'ea' in it," her spelling often comes out garbled like this: waethre