Any parent will tell you that most children with learning disabilities have trouble spelling. They may have trouble with the sounds and phonics, they most often have trouble with the visualization and recall of spelling words, and this can impact their learning ability on almost every level!
Have you ever sat reading with your child and found a word they did not know? Most often we pause and show them the word, maybe even teach them the spelling, and so we move on to the next page. How frustrating is it to encounter the same word on the next page, only to find that they cannot recall the very word you showed them only minute before? Then when the same word appears two pages later, they cannot remember the word once again. Believe me, if this frustrates you as a parent, how much more frustrating will this be for your child with their learning disabilities!
As a Behavioral Optometrist who has worked in the area of children and learning disabilities for over 20 years, I know that there are many factors at work in the above mentioned situation. In an effort to simplify things for myself and my patients, I loosely categorize spelling disabilities into two camps, phonics and visual memory.
Phonics
Phonics involves the using of sound to pronounce the word, and it is especially useful when we encounter a word we do not know. So, even as an adult, if you are reading and come across a word you are unfamiliar with, you use phonics to have a go at figuring the word out by sounding it. However, if you try to read using only phonics, it is slow, laborious and a complete disaster!
Visualization
To read well you have to use sight words, not phonics. It is that simple! In order for children to read, they have to have a reasonable array of sight words that they can instantly recognize. However, many children with learning disabilities are very poor at spelling and hence have an extremely small number of sight words to call upon as they attempt to read.
So any help we can offer that can increase the number of sight words for children with learning disabilities will help in their quest to read fluently. However, just going over and over the same words trying to pound the words into their head simply does not work!
Why does repetition of spelling words work ineffectively when it comes to increasing a child’s sight words? The reason is that the most essential skill in memory, visualization, is not being enhanced. Mindless repetition usually does not break through when it comes to spelling, and all it does is make parents and children angry and frustrated.
The key to visual memory is visualization, and if you can manage to get a children with learning disabilities to visualize (and it is not always that easy!) then you will be able to help them learn hundreds of sight words.
Have you ever asked yourself why so many children and adolescents these days spell badly? Maybe it is the teaching techniques, maybe green house gas, maybe fluoride in the water? No, I don’t think so! I believe that it is tied in with the advent of TV, Dads and the internet. Previously kids listened to radio plays or had books read to them, where they had to visualize the scene in their heads. Now they watch Dads or a website, where all the visualizing is done for them, they just take it in.
So we have given rise to generations of children with learning disabilities who cannot visualize and hence cannot spell! Please understand, I love TV, it ‘s awesome, but it does not encourage me to visualize!
I love working with kids with learning disabilities, and I love working with visualization. It’s fun, the children love it and it always achieves results. So, the progression is this:
1.We need to get children visualizing
2.We need to apply this new found skill to sight word lists
I have spent years developing special therapies and techniques specifically to enhance visualization and word recall. using these technique over a 4-5 month period, I recent had one little girl who had only managed to learn one word a month (in Grade 3), suddenly learn 155 words in 4 weeks. Another boy learned 78 words, another 156, and one girl, not to be outdone by the boys, managed 186 words in one month.
Tags: learning disabilities information