For starters, don’t use the spelling tests that many, many children take each week in school. One of the most frequently heard comments I hear from parents is “Oh he does so well on the spelling tests. Almost always 90 or 100 %.” That is then followed by, “But it's so strange. A week or two later, he doesn’t remember the words--even though he spelled them perfectly on the test.”

If you did any cramming in studying for tests in school, you’ll understand the reasons how this happens. The cramming helped you pass the course. But if you needed any of the information a month or two later, it was nowhere to be found. It seems to have vanished into thin air. That’s essentially what happens with studying for spelling tests. It is a form of cramming that is aimed at holding the information for a specific period of time and it rapidly disappears as your brain makes room for the storage of other short term information.

But it’s very different if you look at what your child writes when he or she has an actual writing assignment (such as keeping a journal, answering a reading comprehension question, and writing sentences in various settings). That writing represents what your child has stored about words and how they are formed. And it tells you if your child is learning what is essential for effective reading; namely whether he or she is getting a handle on what is termed “automaticity.”

“Automaticity” refers to the idea that as we become competent readers, we do not have to go through the slow, painful process of sounding out the various letters to figure out what a word “says.” Instead, we simply “look and know.” That is how you are reading this material and that is how all effective reading occurs.

To complicate matters, children can appear to have automaticity when they in fact have a relatively weak mastery of this critical skill. For example, when the topics are still simple and the words are still short, they can use the theme of a story and one or two letters to “figure out” what a word is saying. So in a story about a plane, a relatively short word starting with “f” will be guessed at as “fly” while in a story about bear searching for food, a relatively longer word starting with “h” is guessed at as “honey.”

With spelling, however, the situation is very different. Knowledge of one or two letters will not enable a child to come up with the correct spelling. Knowledge of phonic rules will also not be too helpful. Using the rules they have been taught, even relatively simple words such as “bee,” “dog” “robot” and “bread” can be spelled in many different ways. (That’s one of the reasons why most phonics programs are content to let children write by using the whole language approach of invented spelling. Their “rules” are just not good enough to ensure accurate spelling and so they are willing to say that accurate spelling is unnecessary at the start of reading.)

The only way a child can display accurate writing is if he or she has developed the vital skill of long term visual memory for words. That skill—the skill of long term visual memory for words—is what allows effective readers to look at a misspelled word (such as beleive, cemetary or privelege) and–without any help (from parent or word processor), instantly know that something is awry—before knowing what exactly is awry. It is only later, after they have examined the word that they can identify the precise error.

How do you assess if your child has mastered this critical skill? The key is to calculate the percentage of errors that are made when he or she writes actual text. Leaving aside “big words” (such as “explorer” or “invention”) that a young child may use to beef up a piece of writing, the remainder of any writing should basically have less than 15 % error, and preferably less than 10% error. If the figure is consistently higher than this, particularly if it enters the 20% or higher range, it is likely that he or she has not developed accurate long term visual memory.

And now for two key questions that may be on your mind--

Why is this important? Well, as reading advances and longer and more complex words keep appearing, the reading will be adversely affected. This is particularly the case after about fourth grade when lots of Latin and Greek-based words permeate the page—words like population, decision, athlete, agriculture and so on). Unlike the short words of earlier texts, effective reading and understanding of these words requires accurate spelling skills.

What can be done? Fortunately, the answer is “a lot.” The key is to have your child carry out a set of copying tasks that involve the following. You take a sentence in a book that your child has read easily. You show the sentence and ask your child to say the first two to four words in the sentence. Then you cover those words and you ask your child to write the words perfectly. If the words are totally accurate, you move on to the next two to four words. If there is an error, you do not tell him or her where it occurred. Instead, you say that an error has been made, you remove the paper and provide a fresh sheet. Then you show the model again and you ask your child to redo the words. You continue in this manner until the sentence has been reproduced from memory with perfect accuracy. It is useful to complete up to three to four sentences a day in this manner. Generally, it will take about six to eight weeks for your child to develop the necessary skills. But once that has been achieved, it is there for life and it will serve as a tremendous aid in both reading and writing.

Oh yes, one last thing. Believe it or not, do everything you can to discourage your child from labeling the letters in the words. As long as a child relies on verbal labeling, he or she will not develop the necessary visual skills. So if your child insists on labeling, simply increase the number of words he or she has to write at any one time (so that it is not two or three but five to six. Once there are that many words, it becomes almost impossible to remember them via labeling and visual memory will come in its place.)