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Home-schoolers and parents of LD (Learning Disabled) students often struggle to find the right curriculum for their child. And when you have several children of different ages to teach, parents find it hard to meet every child’s learning needs. Fortunately, all it takes is a little creativity for a parent to come up with the best spelling system for LD students.

Each child should have their own spelling list, taken from words they have misspelled during the previous week. One child may have ten words, another may only have one. Competition should be avoided as much as possible.

When children feel pressured to spell correctly in their everyday writing, they may begin to avoid difficult words. When a child chooses words they can spell over words that truly convey their meaning, they become stunted as a writer. Parents should view spelling as a journey to be taken, rather than a simple subject to be mastered.

Marks (2007) advocates sticking to a very small spelling list, as small as a single word per child. This word can be written on index cards or sheets of scratch paper, and placed around the house at the child's eye-level.

Every night, each child should have a conversation at the dinner table about their word. This will get the child thinking about their word, and help the word become important to the child. For a child to really remember a spelling word beyond the spelling test at the end of the week, he or she needs to find it personally important. This can only be done with a very short weekly list.

Clever (2008) advocates the use of comics as a way of making reading and writing interesting. While some parents may dismiss comic books and graphic novels as a waste of time, they are actually useful and important teaching tools for spelling. When children have pictures to go along with the words they are reading, they learn more context and start to recognize misspellings.

Parents will find appropriate graphic novels online and in their favorite bookstores. Because writing is an important activity for improving both reading and spelling skills, children should be encouraged to create their own comics. The home-schooling family may find this to be an excellent group activity, with each child creating and illustrating their own story.

The topic of the comic can be of the parents' or the child's choosing. The focus should be on creativity rather than correctness and neatness. Children will enjoy reading one anothers' comics. Parents often find that children who previously did not enjoy school activities will become leaders and mentors in the comic-making activities.

The best spelling system for LD students allows those reluctant students to really shine.

REFERENCES

Clever, S 2008, 'Comics and Graphic Novels,' Scholastic, New York, NY.

Marks, D 2003, 'Spelling Word a Week,' Practical Homeschooling, Jan-Feb, p 31.