Resources to help DD improve spelling at secondary school

[TVwontwork]

Not sure this post will get much traction here, but it seems the most sensible place to post.

DD is 11 and just started secondary school. I’ve always thought her spelling was poor, but primary school never thought there was a problem. It seems more highlighted now she’s at secondary school though and words she should’ve been able to easily spell years ago, are still getting spelled incorrectly. Think exit instead of excite, Wenesday instead of Wednesday. Also spelling rules like removing the e from have to spell having. That kind of thing.

Is there a resource anyone can recommend to help get her to the right stage for her age? I’m not against the idea of a website or an app if there’s something really good out there, but I do find she can spell much more easily on a keyboard/touchscreen than if she’s writing with pen and paper. So want her to be able to spell correctly in her written work at school.

She doesn’t have any learning difficulties, so shouldn’t have any difficulties with learning to spell, she just doesn’t really see what the problem is and isn’t overly concerned about it herself.

Also to add that she has a good vocabulary and reads a lot and higher than her age, so is familiar with more than just basic language.

TIA if anyone can help.

This is going to sound really weird, and I don’t mean it to offend or shock….

But are you 100% sure she can actually read properly?

The reason I say that is excite and exit are not words you get mixed up spelling wise.

I only found out about this recently where there are lots of people in the UK, US and potentially other countries who can kind of half read. Read enough to make out context most of the time, but not enough to actually read fully.

It’s not an intelligence issue. Something got missed when learning to read and they were smart enough to come up with incredible coping strategies. It actually shows they are quite smart but you do need to go all the way back to beginner phonics and relearn if this is the case.

Yes she can definitely read well, but I think you’re right that something went amiss during the earlier phonics learning.
I’m just not sure where to try to get her caught up. She’d be mightily offended and bored if I took her right back to the start. I did try with some of the old learning platforms she used at school but earlier years, but she found it really easy… don’t know if that’s because it was online or it was just tedious.

I would find a passage somewhere with some words she probably doesn’t know and needs to decipher and get her to read it to you whilst you read to check how she’s decoding and whether she can read novel words.

There’s going to be 3 possible outcomes;

• She reads it entirely and perfectly = no reading issue so it’s solely a spelling problem. She can decode, she just can’t construct.
• Shes reading most of it perfectly but struggling to decode novel words = she has sight learned words and has a phonics problem
• She struggles to read it fluently / misses/ misreads or makes up words = general reading problem.

I think you need to explain that you need to get to the bottom of this because otherwise she’s going struggle to progress and that will make life much more difficult that it needs to be. And she’s clearly bright so you just need to identify where that issue is so you can try to figure out how to solve it.

The more info you can gather the better armed you are to get the right help

She can read perfectly, can understand the words, their meanings and use them correctly in a sentence. It’s just the spelling. She doesn’t seem bothered about the fact that her spelling is poor, which hasn’t been helped by primary school never seemingly correcting their spelling, as long as they’ve tried 🙄
Now she’s at secondary I can see a lot of corrections have been made by the teacher on her work, which is good because it demonstrates to DD what I’ve been trying to tell her for ages.
I just don’t know what resources I can use to get her on track. It’s spellings and also spelling rules which seem to be the problems.

Is she dyslexic? My dd2 is dyslexic and can read well for her age, but she can’t spell very well! It might be worth talking to the school about. If she is. dyslexic and finds typing easier then she might want to do that in some subjects. It’s worth thinking about long before she is sitting external exams.

What works well for her in terms of learning spelling? Word shapes, mnemonics etc.? Can she correct a word, if you show her which ones are wrong?

Print out the list of 315 dolch words and have her study them. You could do an at-home challenge with spelling tests and rewards.

Then she needs to read, a lot.
She needs to read books with actual sentences and paragraphs, not graphic novels or the like.

Was going to say the same. My teen reads well, but has some problems with spelling. Was diagnosed dyslexic about 18 months ago.

Is she dyslexic?
If she is or isn’t I recommend: stareway to spelling

it’s a book and a daily programme and it’s tedious as fuck but it works!

Link:

I'd start with the high frequency words. You can do 'look, cover, write, check' until she's able to easily spell the words she will use most often. I'd also check that she can differentiate between words such as their, there and they're. Lots of kids get confused with homophones. Maybe a phonics programme is available through school - there are often resources used in their own literacy interventions that they might share. I'd also work on how words are built, so look at how a prefix or suffix works with a root word. It might be less of a mystery to her if she understands how words are constructed.

I’d ask her to read out loud to you. You’ll soon find out if she can actually read to the right level. Reading in general will improve spelling and grammar as well as vocabulary.

This is DD exactly - she’s a brilliant reader (reading age is 4 years above her actual age) and excellent vocab but when we got her tested she was also off the charts bad for phonological processing and working memory.

She was diagnosed with dyslexia in Yr6 and it suddenly explained a lot!

There are 4 things that were tested and she was super high on 2 and super low on the others which meant she was able to mask it through primary but, as you say, secondary is different.

Could you afford a private assessment?

As I said I really didn’t mean to offend. It’s a phenomenon that was only recently discovered by parents in Covid. As you say the schools don’t take much notice. It was only when parents checked in lockdown that they realised. They could read, just not completely. Some of the kids believed they could read and what they were doing was how everyone read. Others knew they couldn’t but masked it really well.

Reason your post jumped out to me was all the kids would correctly identify the first few letters; but then extrapolate incorrectly. So your excite/ exit jumped out.

Anyway sorry I didn’t mean to offend. Just not many people know about it so thought I should mention.

Goodluck

Has she been assessed for dyslexia? My DC could read fluently, but struggled to write and used really simple language when writing because he couldn't spell the words he would use when speaking. He is dyslexic. He learnt to read by recognising the shape of words.

This rings so true. Neither of my daughters can spell. My sixth former got 6 x 9s, 2 x 8s, 3 x 7s at GCSE. They can both definitely read! Both read for pleasure.

It makes me cringe to think of others' impressions of them from their written work. In my mind I could 99% spell everything by secondary school and if that's rose tinted it's still not too far off the mark. I pick them up every mistake I come across and ask how they spell whatever word it is. I then draw parallels with similar words, point out spelling rules etc and give them related words as an oral exercise . Obviously I annoy them greatly.

I think it's possibly a sign of the times where their peers are still pulling out Wimpy Kid when forced to "read for pleasure" at school and the majority of written communication that they see doesn't contain punctuation. My 14 year old certainly seems to believe it's optional at all time. I do go on the theory that they can't be arsed half the time because they don't think anyone else cares apart from their mad mum. I can't otherwise see how reading has not corrected it by now.

I look forward to reading some more constructive suggestions!

@Bloodysquirellls I'm not sure what you mean. It's a normal reading strategy to guess unfamiliar words from context and great that the kids you describe are using it

I think reading lots and lots of books is one of the best fixes. There are a lot of people who don't read as fluently as they used to; I wouldn't view this as a reflection on your daughter but rather a reflection of a world that has a lot more distractions now. They did a study recently on college students taking an English degree in the US and an insanely high proportion of them were struggling to read an extract of bleak house. Obviously that's a pretty difficult book but if I think how much down time I had to fill without anything much other than reading to fill it, the number of years of my life I must have spent reading compared to how many I'd be likely to have spent it I had been 15 years younger is extraordinary.

I don't think matters are helped that much by phones - certainly I can swipe or part types words and then pick the word that looks right out of the few I can see. It's something I really notice when I'm practicing a new foreign language - it's really helpful in that context but I'm aware that it might be making life easier and meaning I don't learn as much, but presumably it is used similarly by people who can't spell very well in English.

I think the suggestion of dyslexia testing is a good one - if she is dyslexic you are likely to be getting a double whammy of the spelling trouble and potentially reading being extra hard work so not an easy leisure activity.

<Wonders how many spelling and grammar errors I've made in this post... Found and fixed at least 5 so far...>

What was her attendance like at primary? Sounds like she might have gaps in knowledge of some of the spelling rules.

We have used Spellzone in the past but I’m not sure if you can have individual accounts or if it has to be through a school. See also little Wandel which I know some secondaries use to close spelling / phonics gaps in year 7s who come up lower than they should be.

A lot of people on this thread have just never met a bad speller! You can be a brilliant reader and a poor speller - it’s not the same skill. Lots of reading will help, but it doesn’t magically cure the spelling. It comes with time and with lots of annoyingly boring spelling work.

source; 3 non-dyslexic kids who read totally perfectly and well above their age but can’t spell well (inherited from my also v strong reading husband) and of whom at least one writes exited instead of excited!

I am a qualified Dyslexia teacher.
It really isn't a reading problem, it's a spelling problem. I wonder is she really needs a dyslexia assessment. Lack of understanding of the sequencing needed for spelling in English is often a sign of dyslexia post Primary school. Many dyslexics are not diagnosed until they get into Higher Education, because they can read perfectly well. Often handwriting is more difficult than keyboard spelling which is why sometimes a Readonable Adjustment can be using a keyboard rather than a pen

I would have a look at BBC Bitesize for revision of spelling rules.

Alpha to Omega is a good spelling book you could work through with her. Pretty boring but does the job.

Spelling and reading are not necessarily connected. I cannot spell but read v well good English degree from a Russell group uni. My dc are the same. There is a form of dyslexia ( it probably needs a different name) which is linked to spelling and even handwriting- what is that like. I would yes get them to read loads and check they get it by reading to you to see if any tricky words, - phonics also is not great for everyone just the majority so investigate other spelling methods, but also get a dyslexic type test done. One dc at secondary has a laptop due to senco needs linked to spelling and handwriting and gets much better grades.