Difficulty With Spelling Groups

[Silverback]

I am just wondering if anybody has experience of this.

My daughter is in her first year of secondary school. She is smart and works hard.

In primary school, she tended to score well on spelling tests, where she had learned the specific spellings. But she has never really seemed to develop the instinct for spelling correctly. So, outside of spelling tests (which don't happen in secondary school), she tends to make lots of mistakes in spelling words. She reads lots and is very bright, but seems to have a very specific difficulty in spelling in normal writing (but not in learning spellings for a spelling test).

Has anybody else encountered this?

I looked at dyslexia, which it could be, but she doesn't seem to match most of the symptoms for that.

 

[Hedonistic Blonde]

I think lots of reading will help with this. Seeing words spelled correctly in their context. So when she writes or types the word, she'll know instinctively that it looks right or wrong. Rote learning is not great, the best learning is done as part of life and in its context.

When you say she reads a lot, what sort of material? Our daughters, although a little younger, really got into reading a series of books from one author and then the next, and so on.

 

[Janey]

Wouldn't worry too much as it will improve with time and mindful reading. Not as unusual as you might expect.

A solution is to do some dictation and then self correct from the script.

Maybe a paragraph from a book she is reading. It demands listening to the words and the self correcting draws attention to the mistakes. Read slowly enough in short phrases to give her time for each word.

Keep sessions short, max 15 mins. A progress sheet might be and idea with a reward when a certain standard is reached.

But don't let it hamper her love of reading!!

 

[Silverback]

Thanks for all the responses. She reads books constantly (long novels), so if reading was going to help on its own, I think it would have done so by now.

Her brothers learned to read using Jolly Phonics. I can't remember the name of the programme our daughter followed, but it definitely took longer than Jolly Phonics.

I'll look into the suggestions above.