Difficulty writing down words as they sound - Y2.

[LynetteScavo]

DD (6yo) is "excellent" verbally (according to her teacher, and don't we know it! )

Her reading is average.

But her writing is awful. She doesn't seem to hear the sounds in words, so will completely miss out letters or add letters which just aren't there.

She was a late talker, although she babbled lots and was able to make herself perfectly well understood.

Anyone know what's going on here and how I can help her?

Her teacher has suggested abandoning phonics and using flash cards so she learns words by sight. The trouble is, she's not very good at that either.

What is her hearing like? Children this age often suffer from intermittent hearing loss which will impact on speech and ability to segment words. I would probably suggest a hearing test (just to rule this out) and something like earobics

Her hearing is fine. She was tested when she was 2.5 because of her speech delay.

Off to Google earobics!

Unfortunately a hearing test doesn't rule out hearing problems :(

Hearing tests only check if she has hearing loss or not.

An audiologist said DDs hearing was fine - but since then I've found she has huge auditory discrimination and auditory processing problems.

DD did Auditory Integration Training which cured her hypersensitive hearing and auditory discrimination problems.

Here's an Auditory Discrimination Test to see if that's a problem.

Now DD is doing Earobics to improve her auditory processing. Too early yet to say if it's working, but I think it is.

Also Sound Reading looks very interesting.

Here are some Sound Manipulation exercises. If she struggles with them, then you should try something like Earobics or Sound Reading.

IndigoBell, you are a star!

Sound manipulation, as detailed in the link IB gave, is extremely difficult for anyone, let alone someone with auditory processing problems. In fact, I might go so far as to say that if your dc struggles with them you might completely groundlessly conclude that she has some sort of auditory processing problem. I am worried that the OP might regard this as some sort of diagnostic exercise...

Sound manipulation is only possible if the 'subject' has a very well developed awareness of discrete phonemes, which is precisely what the OP says her DD doesn't have. I would advise some work with letters initially; laying out a word, reading it (by sounding out and blending if necessary) then re-reading it with a 'sound' removed. This focusses attention on the direct relationship between sounds and letters and helps to practice some gentle sound manipulation with a visible propmpt. Get this fairly automatic before asking for the spoken word to be broken into discrete sounds.

The other strategy I would suggest would be focussing on the physical 'shapes' and actions which form each 'sound' (e.g tongue position in mouth, strength of passage of air) Then even if the child cannot aurally discriminate them she will be able to discrimihnate them by their 'feel'.

(P.S I cannot bear the word 'focus' to spell! 'Focussing' looks wrong and so does 'focusing'. Any advice on which way is correct? [hconfused] )

focusing

sorry didn't mean to post

apparently both one s and double s are correct [hgrin]

mrz - i guess it's like a choice between buses and busses

Well, she past the Auditory Discrimination Test with flying colours.

But is finding the sound manipulation exercises totally impossible , so thank you for your post, maizieD! I now have something to work on.

Can she match sounds to letter shapes?

Yes, she's fine with that.

Initially teachers thought her poor writing was due to her poor fine motor skills, and being one of the youngest in the class. Her reception teacher was confident she would catch up with the other children and would get all 3's in her Y2 sats...but she is a long way off from getting 3s! In year 1 she seemed to slip from being an able child to being in the bottom groups, much to her displeasure!

I would recommend both earobics and write from the start ( got mine from amazon)