Help your child to improve spelling skills with ease!

Many students have difficulty with spelling and memorizing words for their weekly spelling or vocabulary tests. This is due in part to the fact that over half of the words in the English language don’t follow phonetic rules. This makes the task frustrating for many spellers. Phonics programs help students to spell words that follow the rules, but how can the rest of the words be learned? Words that fall in the category of sight words, or other words that cannot be sounded out, can be difficult for students to memorize.

Many teachers have students write the word several times and use it in a sentence. This strategy works for some, but not all. Many of our clients have spent an hour per night working with their child on memorizing spelling words, and still their child did not pass the weekly spelling test. Others received a good grade on the test but then forgot the words the following week. The reason some students have difficulty memorizing their spelling words is because they are not visualizing or seeing the words in their mind’s eye. Visualization is an important key in regard to helping students improve spelling skills.

Clients have often been excited to bring in articles to our clinic with pictures of spelling bee winners that were looking upward while spelling, as this is the strategy I teach. Looking upward accesses the visual cortex of the brain, according to the study of neuro-linguistic programming, and makes it easier to visualize or picture information. Seeing the spelling word in one’s mind enables the word to be remembered easily and efficiently.

Most people look up and to the left for accessing memory. Others look up and to the right. In my ebook Beyond Tutoring: Strategies to Improve Reading, Spelling, Comprehension and Memory, I detail how to determine which direction is best for your particular child to look when memorizing spelling words. In addition, I explain exactly how I incorporate weekly practice to make this skill a habit. Learning this skill has dramatically helped to improve spelling for many of our clients, and the result is they improve their grades AND spend less time studying as well. And, of course, they remember the words long-term, as that is the goal for administering spelling tests. The students’ spelling skills improve because they are studying efficiently and using the brain the way it was intended to be used for memorization.