Spelling Help

Is this your child?

• Cannot spell phonetically

• Needs help with spelling conventions

• Tripped up by spelling exceptions

These are common warning signs of a near term need for spelling help and a possible longer term reading problem. Spelling difficulty is almost always a sign of an incomplete reading foundation. If a child need help with spelling, if he cannot recognize spelling patterns, that calls into question his decoding technique.

Spelling is an important reading skill. The eventual goal of reading instruction is for every word to be a sight word that can be read automatically, effortlessly. The only way the brain can catalog so many words is by recognizing spelling patterns.
Critical reading skills

If spelling skills are inadequate, high level reading comprehension, so critical for high school academic success, will be a challenge.
Reading comprehension program

Why Children Struggle With Spelling

In early life, a number of struggling readers are actually thought to be good spellers. What is happening here though is that many bright youngsters rely heavily on memorization when learning to spell and read. As children age and the word list expands, this coping strategy falls apart. Most often a spelling problem is a language processing problem. The child is either:

-- struggling to hear the phonemes that make up words, so "surround" is spelled out as "sroun" or some other "muddy" version. Or:

-- an overloaded language processing system hears the phonemes for phonetically regular words, but is too overloaded to be able to take in interventions and/or the many exceptions.

Gemm's Approach

While most spelling programs tackle spelling difficulties by encouraging memorization, our spelling software takes a different tack. It first builds phonological awareness to build a phonics foundation, then works through spelling conventions, rules and exceptions in sequence.

Improved auditory processing will increase listening accuracy and phonics skills. This makes spelling for children easier, especially phonetically regular words. Our programs are industrial strength phonics instruction.

Improved auditory processing efficiency will also help unburden an overloaded language processing system, freeing up mind capacity to observe how words are spelled while reading and listening. This is learning to spell using natural learning. While our programs do teach these rules and exceptions in the second phase, our students often find the spelling help from their improved processing is more powerful, as it strengthens their natural learning skills, and their natural spelling, like a skilled reader.

Think of it this way. If you are not a Dutch speaker and do not know the sounds of Dutch, learning to spell Dutch words is an overwhelming task. But once you learn to recognize those sounds, a huge number of words become easy to spell naturally, and so you can focus on the oddly spelled words. The task is no longer overwhelming. Gemm does this for children learning to spell in English.

These skills will improve reading comprehension and fluency and create a foundation for future academic success by reducing the risk of problems with reading in future grades.
Reading programs in steps