How Children Learn To Spell

Why Can My Child Read But Not Spell?

The answer is usually found in the reading pattern that your child chose when learning to read.

The brain processes reading through the auditory and visual loops. Four out of Five children learn to read using the auditory pathway.

These students map sound to symbol codes/patterns via the auditory cortex. Then they process the sounds as if they were spoken words.

One in five children take a different route and use a visual pattern approach. They process text using their visual memory.

Smart kids who are able to read but struggle with spelling are usually visual readers.

Children Learn to Spell by recognizing the shape of a common word, the length, and even the beginning and ending letter of words.

Children Learn to Spell Through Context

They use contextual clues to help them fill in words that they don’t know. Spelling becomes very challenging for visual readers because of the atypical learning pattern that they have adopted.

These children will often do very well on weekly spelling tests because of their high visual memory. However, when it comes to applying spelling in the context of written expression they make more errors.

For example: they leave out a vowel, or use one vowel but not the vowel team (sno for snow) They sometimes omit letters like “litle” for “little” or “smok” for “smoke”.

The more taxed the memory system is the more errors these kids make.

How to Improve Spelling For Visual Readers

The solution is to identify the underlying mental process and patterns to find a treatment plan that engages the auditory cortex.

This teaches the child how the sound-to-symbol pattern is applied, and works more efficient.

If a child struggles to discriminate and process the individual sounds accurately, a device called Forbrain® can be beneficial.

Forbrain enhances specific patterns of your voice via the auditory visual language loop, and corrects the way they hear their own voice leading to better speech production, and increased discrimination of sounds.

To find out more about Forbrain® and use a discount provided by The Cognitive Emporium, follow this affiliate link: http://www.forbrain.com.

Learning To Spell Resources

Another way to assist the struggling speller is to link imagery to all the different sounds in the words.

Letterland is a unique, phonics-based approach to teaching reading, writing and spelling.

The Letterland characters transform plain black letter shapes into child-friendly pictograms and they all live in an imaginary place called Letterland.

Simple stories about the Letterland characters, explain the full range of dry phonics facts so that children are motivated to listen, to think, and to learn.

These stories explain letter sounds & shapes, allowing children to progress quickly to word building, reading and writing.

This brings the visual learners back into their comfort zone and allows them to build the visual-auditory synaptic links that they need if they are going to read in an auditory way.

Visit www.letterland.com to find out more about this research based curriculum.