ok I have just had a not great parents evening. DC has always been unable to spell, she is now 10. I first spoke to the school about possible dyslexia type issues back in Year 1 as her reading was odd (she was very good at reading but seriously seriously struggle with phonics) and she could write for pages with great grammar and language but could spell the same simple words wrong numerous ways within a few lines, being from a teaching background I knew it wasn't quite "right". anyway fast forward a few years and spelling and handwriting have always been a massive issue for her. her content and sentence structure etc has always been above expected levels. She had very secure level 3s in her KS1 SATs. Now we are being told she will fail her writing KS2 SATs next year because of her spelling and handwriting and I don't really know what we should do. She has quite severe hypermobility in her fingers and poor proprioception so handwriting is really hard for her. it CAN be relatively neat but only with the most enormous amount of concentration so this tends to happen if copying something. if she has to actually think of what to write at the same time she just can't seem to do it. When I say neat however it still looks jerky and not very fluid. She can learn spellings for a spelling test and do reasonably well (say 16/20 type level) but she can't spell simple words and however hard we work on them it doesn't seem to make any difference. She is really upset as she says she tries hard and I have to say I am inclined to believe her, we have always been told she is very hard working at school. She doesn't want any intervention really as she hates being singled out as different or having a problem but equally nothing really has been offered other than fine motor skills groups and she tried that and was too good for them so it demoralised the other children.
So I suppose my questions are
other than Stareway to Spelling which we have been using what else could we do with regards to spelling?
how much do SATs matter when they start year 7? do all schools automatically use them to decide on groupings or do they do their own testing? might they actually see the discrepancy between spelling/handwriting and content?
she was given a dyslexia screening test outside of school when she was 6, no indicators but the feeling was that the test for her age was too simplistic, not sure if that makes sense but it almost didn't go far enough to show up her problems (over a certain length word, these only had 2 syllables or whatever, I can't quite remember and her problems were over 4 syllables or it was words she already knew by sight). I am not saying she is dyslexic but it has always seemed like something along those lines. She has a word finding difficulty (diagnosed) and a section of dyspraxia (only relates to certain types of things, variables generally). She had a WISC at the same age, verbal score 2 standard deviations lower than non verbal. Processing speed average, verbal average, non verbal and working memory both very high.
I really don't know how to help her. I don't care whether or not anyone finds out if she has a definite problem, she has to learn to deal with the symptoms/problems regardless of what it may or may not be called but I don't know what to do as she just genuinely seems unable to spell or write neatly. it seems such a shame her other writing skills can't even be recognised in the tests because of these things. Any advice would be very welcome. TIA