How Can You Educate Children With Learning Disabilities To Spell Well?

By: Darin Browne Click author's name for more of his/her articles

Any parent will tell you that most children with learning disabilities have difficulties spelling. They may have problems with the sounds and phonics, they frequently have trouble with the visualization recall of spelling words, and this can influence their learning ability on nearly every level!

Have you ever sat reading with your child and discovered a word they did not know? Most often we pause and show them the word, maybe even instruct them the spelling of the word, and thus we move on to the next page. How exasperating is it to encounter the same word on the next page, just to find that they cannot recall the very word you showed them just minutes before? Then when the same word reappears two pages later, they cannot consider the word once again. Believe me, if this annoys you as a parent, how much more exasperating must 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 recognize that there are a lot of factors at work in the above mentioned situation. In an attempt to simplify things for myself and my patients, I loosely group spelling disabilities into two camps, phonics and visual memory.

Phonics

Phonics involves the using of sound to pronounce the word, and it is particularly useful when we stumble upon 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. Then again, if you try to read using merely phonics, it is slow, laborious and a complete disaster!

Visualization

To read capably you have to use sight words, not phonics. It is that straightforward! In order for children to read, they have to have a reasonable range of sight words that they can effortlessly recognize. However, loads of children with learning disabilities are very poor at spelling and thus have an exceedingly small number of sight words to call upon as they endeavor to read.

Therefore any support we can provide that can enlarge the number of sight words for children with learning disabilities will assist in their quest to read fluently. However, simply going over and over the same words trying to batter the words into their brain simply does not work!

Why does repetition of spelling words work unsuccessfully when it comes to growing a child's sight words? The reason is that the most underlying 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 annoyed and frustrated.

The most important component of visual memory is visualization, and if you can manage to get a children with learning disabilities to visualize (and it is not at all times that easy!) then you will be able to assist them learn hundreds of sight words.

Have you ever asked yourself why loads of children and adolescents these days spell badly? Perhaps it is the teaching techniques, perhaps green house gas, perhaps fluoride in the water? No, I don't consider so! I believe that it is locked in with the advent of TV, DVDs and the internet. In the past kids listened to radio plays or had books read to them, where they had to imagine the scene in their heads. Now they look at DVDs or a website, where all the visualizing is done for them and they just take it in.

Thus we have given rise to generations of children with learning disabilities who can't 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 enjoyable, the children love it and it always achieves results. So, the is this:

1. We want to get children visualizing
2. We want to apply this new found skill to sight word lists

I have spent years developing special therapies and tips specifically to enhance visualization and word recall. using these technique over a 4-5 month period, I recent had one little girl who had merely 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.

These techniques do work if you present them a go, thus if you want to learn more about my special therapy program â€œLearning @ Lightspeedâ€ assessment out our website.

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About The Author: To discover positive, holistic and effective solutions for learning disabilities you can start using right now, visit Children Learning Disabilities.