Help on Spelling

[dhappleby]

I'm new to this forum and looking for some advice from seasoned parents of ADHD kids. My son (age 7) was diagnosed a couple years ago. He is not on any meds. He is doing relatively well in school (1st grade) in most areas except for spelling. He gets 10 spelling words each week, and has homework Mon-Thurs that involves writing these words once or twice. He is doing fine reading, has a fine vocab and understands the words, etc. But the spelling test itself each Friday is total hit or miss. Some weeks he gets 8 right; some weeks he gets 3 right. It doesn't seem to matter how many times he writes a word. Repeatedly quizzing him doesn't seem to improve his ability to get a word correct. Has anyone else had a similar experience? Any advice that has worked on how to improve spelling performance?

Thanks!

[anon4now]

I'm sure someone with more experience with this will come along and help, but he may have a learning disability.

I know with my son, we do a number of exercises, from saying the word and spelling it outloud, writing the word, defining and using the word in a sentence, and breaking down the word. If a paticular word is difficult, I will teach him a trick in order to remember, like I before E type stuff.

Anon

[lisacap]

My son is the same way, though he as a ton of other disabilities as well. I ask for the words on Friday of each week what he will be tested on the following friday. I put each word up on the "word wall" in my dining room. As he learns a new word, can say it use it in a sentence and spell it then recognize it. We take it down and put it in the folder. We also never write the words in the order the list comes home. He was able to memorize the letters that went with each number. So if 1. was CAT and the teacher said the day of the test 1. is DOG, he would still write cat because they were memorized that way. I take the list when he gets it and mix them up enough for 6 days, each day I give him a new list of the words in a different order. I have him write them 5 times each in the different order of the night he gets the page. He then goes to the word wall and finds each word on the sheet in the order of the new sheet. It sounds a lot but doesn't take much time. The other suggestion is ask for less words twice a week. Instead of testing him on ten, get the words of Friday and Tuesday. So he has 3 days to do both sets. On Tuesday he gets tested for the words he took home on Friday, and Friday he gets tested for the words he took home Tuesday. Hope it helps.

[misty]

Lisas idea of splitting up the words is a great suggestion! Hopefully you can get your son's teacher to work with you so that he can succeed. My daughter was Dxed with a learning disability in language arts & spelling words were a nightmare for her, especially when she got into words that sounded the same & were spelled differently like bear and bare or wait and weight. Her teacher reduced the amount of words she had to learn & with a lot of extra practice & mixing them up like Lisa also suggested, she managed to do pretty good. She's almost 15 now & doing great in all language arts classes.

[charliegirl]

Time to get out the pudding! ;D

Seriously, for some reason, having a child write it in huge, fun letters helps. I found this when I was researching how to help my son with math. Studies show that kids remember better but I don't remember why. (Maybe I should have written it in pudding! )You can use pudding on waxed paper, writing in sand, anything that allows him to write huge.

You can also make up funny songs and ditties which use the word and spell it out. Think about how easy it was to spell bingo because b-i-n-g-o , bingo was his name-o.

Welcome to our site! I hope you continue to post and join us in our Just Kicking Back With Friends section along with asking questions and helping us out with problems we post about. We tend to become an online family very easily.

[misty]

Pudding, sand, etc. helps because it uses different sections of the brain, thus enabling the info to get into long term memory easier. They told me with Bill to have him do that with things he had trouble remembering because it would help his brain regrow the connections. I remember when you & I talked about doing that for our kids too.

[bugsmom]

Like CG said, singing the words worked wonders for my son too. When he was in 1st grade and the spelling tests started, we would make up silly songs to the words. The sillier, the better for my son. In fact his teacher asked me after a few tests why he was humming during his tests, and I explained it to her and she was great. We just had to make sure he was as quite as possible not to disturb the rest of the class.

My son's in 7th grade now and I homeschool him. I will still resort back to making up a silly song so he'll remember an important fact.

Welcome to the board!

[puzzled]

The pudding/sand thing works because it is tactile. Most kids are 'hands on' learners and this method helps to make the spelling tactile. As the others said, it is a good way to get the learning embedded in the memory deeper, and who knows? Maybe he will 'write' the word on his desk with his finger to help him remember how he wrote it during the test. Shaving cream works well too, and cleans off the table (don't think a wood table would like it though, LOL) You can use a serving tray, or a large cookie sheet to make clean up easier. When I taught preschool, we would put the sand in a tray, but the shaving cream we let them spread all over the tables, they LOVED it.

The word wall idea is a good one too, many elementary teachers have word walls in the classroom and add words as the children gain vocabulary, so it may be a concept he is familiar with.

What kind of ADHD does your son have? Is it the inattentive type, the hyperactive type or a combination of the two? Perhaps the problem is distraction during the testing? You can ask the teacher/school for accommodations, such as a 504 plan since he has a diagnosis. Maybe taking the test in a quiet room (the school resource room?) would help him to concentrate and remember the words better? Maybe an oral testing would be better for him? Experiment with a few different scenarios (if the teacher/school is willing.....) to see if you can find an accommodation that will help your son to succeed.


Welcome to our board! You will find this a very friendly place to visit!

[jfla]

This is a great thread with lots of helpful suggestions.

I think part of the key to finding a technique that might work for your child is figuring out how your child learns best. Are they visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, perhaps even olfactory (smell). As you know what works for one may not for another.

Finding out later that my son has extremely low visual processing, answered why visual techniques didn't work.

What worked for him:
- spelling the words aloud with a rhythmic pattern related to the letters and pattern of letters
-relating the spelling of the word to words he already knew
-making a song out of the word
-use a song he knows which relates to the meaning of the word and include the spelling of the word within the song
-have him figure out which word family it is similar to (fare,mare, stare)
-stories about the letters in the words. (he had these but I can't think of any at the time)
-writing on a large white board, large arm movements

Other suggestions:
-it is important that your child can read the words before they are asked to spell them

-for visual learners, draw a line around the shape of the word bringing attention to the shape of the word as a whole. Present your child with three word shape blanks (just the shape, not the letters) and one printed word which matches. This can be drawn on paper or on cards. Then have your child decide which shape matches. the next step would be copying the word into the shape. next level is writing the word in the shape without the word near by for reference.

-developmental repetition: This is a technique I came up with after seeing how the electronic game "Simon" worked. parent repeatedly spells the word, each time adding one more letter. The child echoes it each time. By the time they finish, there was enough repetition that the child remembered the word. this worked great in a class of deaf kids where we used fingerspelling; some poor spellers find fingerspelling helpful.
Example: bear
Parent: b
Child: b
Parent: b-e
Child: b-e
Parent: b-e-a
Child: b-e-a
Parent: b-e-a-r
Child: b-e-a-r
Parent: b-e-a-r
Child: b-e-a-r

Lastly, is perspective. It is great that dhappleby's child is doing well in most areas. My son had so many other things going on it seemed that spelling and handwriting were the least of his problems.

Although it always remained a difficult area, we saw a big improvement in spelling and writing, after starting medication midyear in second grade.

Spelling for him was related to ADHD, LDs and how important spelling was for him. Considering his difficulties, I never made a big deal about spelling until he was a junior or senior in high school.
After ten years of watching him write "paino" instead of "piano" on his To Do lists, I finally said, "For someone that loves piano as much as you do, (that's the first thing he would do when he came home from school), one would think you would spell it correctly."

He never mispelled it after that.

[dhappleby]

Wow - thanks for all of the helpful suggestions! I really appreciate the time people took to answer my request.

To answer some of the questions asked:

- My son has both the inattentive and hyperactive aspect of the condition. He can attend to things that interest him, but has a VERY hard time sticking with things that don't interest him. And there are times that he just simply cannot sit still. We went to Disney World last month for spring break (first time for us as a family), and we all had a great time - except for dinners! He just can't sit still for a restaurant dinner, even a kid-friendly one...especially after a day of lots of stimulation.

- He is a very visual learner, in that his pattern recognition is amazing. In fact, he has always blown us away with this sense of direction, ability to remember how to get somewhere he has only been once, etc. I think he has learned to read almost completely by sight-word technique, rather than phonics. He knows the sounds each letter makes, but just will not take the time to "sound out" a word he doesn't know. I stopped fighting this early on. When he's reading to me and comes to a word he doesn't know, I tell him to try it, and if he gets it wrong I just tell him what it is. If it comes up 2 or 3 more times in the story, he'll know it by the 3rd time. He is reading just fine, but his lack of phonics application certainly contributes to his problem with spelling.

- His teacher, guidance counselor, principal and school in general are very supportive. His teacher already lets him take his test separately from the rest of the class....usually he and another student will go out in the hall with a teacher's aide to take the test. His teacher will sometimes even let him decide when he wants to take it, or do other similar work. At our conference in March, she showed me a math test she tried to give him - the first time he just wasn't in the right mental "place", and he was doing terrible....she knew he could do better, so just waited until a different time when he was calmer, and then he did just fine. We're very lucky to have such an understanding teacher/school!

I will try some of the suggestions made - especially the writing with shaving cream (he and his sis will both love it), and the word wall too. And yes, I will certainly keep coming back to this site for more help and support!

Thanks!
Dina