Jj is for Jottings 71.  4 Signs of Weak Spellers.

This is just a quick post a week after the last one, so I can get back into sync with my working days.

The 4 tell-tale symptoms of weak spellers are:

• Struggling to decode words when reading i.e. to sound out the word if they don’t immediately recognise it.
• Struggling to retrieve words from memory and to encode words when writing and spelling.
• Weak spellers may have seen a word many times but, due to their weak image recall, they can rely only on sound to help them reproduce it.
• If a word is spelt as it sounds, then there may be no difficulty, eg. “not” or “can”. A word like “said” may be spelt as “sed”, which is sensible from a sound point of view, but incorrect.   However, if they don’t know their sound-letter links, they can’t even do that.  I can recommend a really good book to assist with the sound part of the equation.  It’s called “Aa is for Alpacas”.  Heard of it?  Ideally introduce it to your 3 and 4 year olds.

For good spellers, the connections between sight and sound is well-developed. When writing a word, good spellers can visualize the shape and relative position of the letters clearly.

The good news is that there are programs which can help. An example is Stareway To Spelling, which can assist both children or adults who struggle to spell and read non-phonetic words. That is, words which are not spelt as they sound – words like enough.