Spelling Help - Good Match
Let’s dive into what has been happening.
The underlying problem
We have been helping children with poor reading for about ten years and all those children started the course with very poor spelling. But we were finding that their spelling was dropping into place soon after their reading, without having to work on it directly.
So we tried it with children with good reading but poor spelling. And the same thing happened.
What we found was that most of these children like yours, were very visual children who had been treating the words as pictures, rather than as a code.
To pass a test they had revised the image of each word and memorized it as a picture. Some were able to get ten out of ten in the test. It is really a very clever trick!
But two weeks later those images had faded again. They were then back to what we call “Frankenstein spelling”, where letters are just bolted together (like “woz”, “hrd” and “inuf”).
So the spelling lists had been a waste of time. Sad and tough, because often they had been working hard at it for several years.
The solution
OK, so what is the way out of this situation?
The way we do it is to change the way these children read. We get them decoding words as they read and their brain eventually learns to encode them as well.
Gains in reading too
The nice thing is that generally these are very bright children who could be reading well above the class average. While their reading has seemed okay, it has actually been well below their potential.
How?
The process we use is called the Trainertext Method. We present text with visual images above each word so that it can be decoded, even if it is unfamiliar.
You can check it out on our Trainertext explanation page, if you want to:
And after about 150 lessons, this decoding practice will have built the right subconscious letter-sound mapping for their spelling to start to crystallize.
What to expect
So it is important to understand that this is suited to children with really atrocious spelling. If you have a child who gets the odd word wrong, that is something else.
The goal in the course is for you to see 80-90% accuracy in your child’s free writing. At that stage the mistakes will mostly be the odd letter out of place, unless the word is a very unfamiliar one and irregular.
From that base, you will see continued progress beyond the course, towards 100% accuracy or close to it.
If you are unsure of it, I can put you in touch with hundreds of people nearby who have seen it happen. Every child gets good progress. Here is a case study (on our former Easyread System site) of a child going through the process:
Doing a 10-lesson free trial
We are currently running a 10 lesson free trial. So you can see the process in action without any financial risk at all: