Child Struggling With Spelling: How A Parent Can Help

Are you wondering why spelling is so difficult for your child? Whether they are spelling with dyslexia or other reading difficulties, keep reading!

If you want to help your child improve their spelling and overcome their frustration, then knowing some things about the English spelling system is for you!

I have helped 100’s of students learn to become better spellers using a variety of approaches, and I can confidently say learning that “English is Logical and Not crazy” helps them the most.

Whether you are a homeschool parent teaching spelling to your dyslexic child or a parent helping your child struggling with spelling at school, learning a few tips about English will help your child spell better and stop the overwhelm.

So grab your coffee, sit down in a comfy chair, and get ready to explore some fascinating things about English spelling that will help everyone, and especially someone spelling with dyslexia or other reading difficulties, to improve.

Get Uncovering the Logic of English by Denise Eide

How A Parent Can Help A Child Struggling With Spelling

Does Spelling Even Matter Anymore?

Yes! Some people will try to tell you or your child that spelling doesn’t matter anymore because we have AI assisted technology that will autocorrect your words.

Well, first of all, you have to be in the ballpark for AI to know what word you are trying to spell and you also have to recognize the correct spelling when it gives you suggestions.

Plus, we don’t always write and spell using technology. Handwriting notes and sketching out ideas on paper is still alive and well.

Based on the thinking that spelling doesn’t matter anymore, school staff might try to not include spelling goals in your child’s IEP.

But who are the people that are saying spelling doesn’t matter? They are people who know how to spell!

Imagine going through life embarrassed to write notes or ask for a promotion because you can’t spell. Not being able to spell holds you back in life.

Get A Writing Sample From Your Child

A tip I learned recently during an interview with Kelli Sandman-Hurley, author of Spelling and Dyslexia, is to look at something your child wrote on their own without help. 

Their writing sample will tell you how much your child knows about the English writing system.

It helps you test their spelling knowledge and informs you what they understand about spelling patterns, grammar, and punctuation.

Most importantly, your child’s spelling mistakes will show you if they have phonemic awareness or not. Even if the spelling is wrong, is it phonetically correct?

Strengthen Their Phonemic Awareness

The foundation for learning how to read and spell is Phonemic Awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and remember the speech sounds in words.

When children learn to spell they need to be able to segment the sounds of the word and write the matching letter or letters for the sounds they are saying. 

Since segmenting and blending are two sides of the same coin, children can “sound it out” to both read and spell a word.

To strengthen phonemic awareness in children, do lots of activities with sound blending, segmenting, and substitution. 

For young children, read 11 Fun Phonological Awareness Activities at Home.

Explain That Sounds Are Represented By Graphemes

Tell your child that we spell with graphemes, not letters. A grapheme is a letter or a string of letters that represent sounds.

Graphemes (letters and strings of letters) don’t make sounds like we are taught in school, but they are actually just symbols or pictures that represent the sounds we make when we speak.

When your child sounds out a word, make sure they realize that each sound might be represented by 1, 2, 3, or 4 letters. There might be many more letters than sounds in a word.

Show Your Child How Sounds Map To Letters

Show your child how sounds map to graphemes by dotting and dashing words. Put a dot under a letter that represents one sound. Draw a line under a string of letters that represents one sound.

Do Sound-Symbol Mapping Activities

Give your child a paper with empty boxes. Write a list of words in the left column of a grid. Now have them say the word and count the sounds by holding up their fingers for each sound. They can only use the number of boxes as fingers they are holding up.

Have them say the sounds as they write the graphemes in the boxes. This activity helps them clearly see how English works.

Do Word Sorts To Show Different Spellings For Same Sound

Teach your child that the same sound can be spelled in different ways.

English is complex because not only can several letters represent one sound, the same sound can also be represented by many different graphemes.

Word sorts will help your child understand this. Choose a sound, for example the /ai/ sound. Create 6-7 categories and put the different spellings as a header for each category.

Prepare a list of words. Now have the child read the word and then say as they write each word into the correct category.

Dictate Words With The Patterns You Have Taught

After doing a word sort with the pattern you are teaching, dictate some words using this pattern. Dictate? Is that a spelling test. Yes!

Dictating is a spelling test to practice the patterns you have just taught them. It is not like a school spelling test where you memorize a bunch of random words. It is a guided spelling test to practice the spelling patterns.

To continue with the example of spellings for the /ai/ sound, you can write all the different sounds for the same spelling on the top of the page. Now dictate words that all have this sound.

Your child can use the list of the graphemes when they say the sounds as they write the word. To avoid frustration, you can tell them which one to use. For example, say, “use number 3.”

Teach Them To Be Patient With Themselves.

Some students will become overwhelmed that there are so many different graphemes or spellings for the same sound in English.

Even though you will explicitly teach over and over that the same sound can have different spellings, students spelling with dyslexia seem to always choose the most basic phonetic spelling. 

In order for a word to become automatic in both reading and spelling, it has to become orthographically mapped in your brain. This means that the sound, spelling, and meaning are all connected and happen instantaneously when you read a word. 

Orthographic mapping happens after 1-4 exposures to a word for most people, but it takes 25 or more exposures for people with dyslexia or other reading difficulties.

Trust The Process

If your child truly understands that:

• graphemes represent the sounds in our spoken language
• same sounds can have different spellings (graphemes)
• same spellings (graphemes) can represent different sounds in different words

then their brain will start to self-teach. The brain is an amazing organ. It seeks patterns. 

A child struggling with spelling or spelling with dyslexia needs to know that their brain is amazing and to trust the process even if it takes longer than for people without dyslexia.

Investigate Why A Word Is Spelled The Way It Is

Some students will want to know why a word is spelled the way it is. It is not enough for them to be told which spelling to use and to trust the process. They want to know why.

So saying “just sound it out” or even “say as you write” isn’t always enough for a child struggling with spelling or spelling with dyslexia.

They might get overwhelmed with all the different choices to spell a sound. They might say “English is crazy!”

Don’t agree with them. Instead, help them understand that the same spelling can have different sounds because English spelling is actually not based entirely on sounds but also on morphemes.

Explain That English is Morphophonemic

English spelling only seems crazy if you expect it to be a phonetic language like Italian, Spanish, or Finnish. (One letter represents one sound.) But it is actually a morphophonemic language.

Morphophonemic means that the English spelling system is built with morphemes, not syllables. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning. They include prefixes, suffixes, and base words. 

Our words do break up into syllables as we speak, but these divisions don’t always match the morphemic structure of English. And the morphemic structure controls the spelling.

To know why a word is spelled the way it is, you have to be curious about morphemes and the history of words.

Continue Your Structured Word Inquiry

Many students struggling with spelling want to know why a word is spelled the way it is. Spelling with a Speech-to-Print approach can only go so far. Some struggling spellers need a reason.

99% of English words have a reason for their spelling. Yes, you read that correctly.

So, don’t say English is crazy and you just have to memorize that. Instead get excited and say as Kelli Sandman-Hurley suggests, “that’s a really interesting spelling, let’s go find out the reason why”.

You and your child can find out why a word is spelled the way it is by going to www.etymonline.com. Here you can learn about the history of the word to give you clues to its spelling.

Ask These Questions Instead Of Saying Sound It Out

Here are some more questions Kelli Sandman-Hurley suggests asking your child in her book Dyslexia and Spelling to guide them to discover the correct spelling:  

• What is the base word?
• What is the meaning of the word?
• Is the base word spelled right? No? How do you know?
• What meaning are you trying to spell? 
• What function are you trying to spell?
• What prefixes and suffixes are there?

Sandman-Hurley shows many examples of how the spelling never changes from the base word, but the meaning and pronunciation do. 

For example, think about how the word “please” retains its spelling in “pleasure” even though the pronunciation changes. Another example is “heal” and “health”.

Use Your Spelling Voice

After you have mapped the sounds to the spellings and have understood why a word is spelled the way it is, then it is OK to use your spelling voice to remember a spelling.

Your spelling voice is the voice you use if you were reading the word phonetically. It is not the way you actually pronounce the word.

A classic example is Wednesday. Almost everyone probably uses their spelling voice to say “wed nes day” when they spell instead of “wenz day”.

Go look up why we pronounce Wednesday the way we do. It’s fascinating.

Change Your Goal From Perfect To Mindful Spelling

Spelling lags behind reading for all people. Not just for a child struggling with spelling or someone spelling with dyslexia.

In spelling, the brain has to retrieve patterns from memory which is much harder than simply recognizing patterns like in reading.

But even though it is a more difficult skill, writing is also the best way to become a better reader. You are forced to think about all the sounds in a word when you are trying to spell it. 

And when the word has complex spellings, you have the opportunity to become curious about the word. To investigate it and learn something new.

As Sandman-Hurley suggests, the goal is not perfect spelling, but more mindful spelling.

To Wrap Up

A parent can help a child struggling with spelling by explicitly:

• showing them how sounds in the words we say map to graphemes,
• showing them how the same sound can be represented by different graphemes, and
• showing them how the same graphemes can have different pronunciations depending on the word.

To practice this, you can have your child do:

• sound-symbol mapping activities
• word sorts
• dictations

All these activities involve practice with blending, segmenting, and substituting sounds.

To go a step further, you can investigate the history of the word and try to understand its morphemic structure. This gives more clues to the spelling than the sounds alone.

People with dyslexia and other reading difficulties will struggle with spelling their whole life but at least by understanding the logic of English, they understand why it is spelled the way it is and why it is difficult. But Not Crazy!

FAQs

Next steps:

• Get a Free Tutoring Consultation/Assessment
• Contact me and tell me about your child’s reading
• Read: 11 Fun Phonological Awareness Activities At Home
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