Spelling

How is your child doing in spelling? My child is not a great speller. This is kind of odd actually, because she is an excellent reader, and usually being an excellent reader indicates being a good speller as well. Just one more exception to the rule…my child seems to live for this!
I think that I have figured out something regarding spelling. If you don’t think you can spell, you probably can’t. Confidence has a lot to do with not only ability but desire. My daughter is an example. She believes that she cannot spell. She would never make any effort to learn to spell better because she has already decided she is a failure at it.
One of the ways that I hope to improve my daughter’s spelling is to let spelling be fun. I have to set her up to succeed because she already believes she has failed. If I teach spelling in a manner in which she is doomed to fail, not taking her learning styles into consideration, then she most assuredly will fail.
We use games, both online and in person. Sometimes we toss a bean bag back and forth as we practice spelling. Sometimes we do exercises like word ladders, that help build words from word families. Sometimes we can incorporate keyboarding and spelling together, so that she is practicing both. The other thing that we do is utilize Vocabulary and Spelling City. We can use their lists, or import our own, and those words can be used for word search puzzles, hang man, and games like hig pig.