You know, "Your kid needs to study!" is a very unhelpful and inappropriate response.

[conuly]

If it's true, we already know it by looking at the results. And if it's not, it's just insulting by implying that we (and the kid) are just damn lazy.

Evangeline took a spelling test today. And she failed miserably. Which is funny because she got all those words right yesterday when I tested her on them! I'm putting under the cut the text of the email I sent Jenn about it.

The teacher left the note "She has to study her words!" but the truth is she *did* study them. She got them exactly right when I tested her on them yesterday afternoon, and she got them almost entirely right when I tested her on them again on the train after seeing the results. But when I tested her I was very careful, the second time I said the word, to enunciate it very carefully, as in "Your first word is thick. Thhhhiiiiiik."

She got all her word study words wrong. It's the specific way she got them wrong that interests me.

Shop became snp (p is written backwards)

Shut = suot

bath = baf (well, that one makes sense)

mash = mace

quick = kice

chick = kike

thin = tine

chin - kine

thick - tice

whiz = wise

If I had to guess, I'd say she isn't hearing all the sounds clearly in normal speech, leading to trouble sounding it out. Then, since she knew they had a pattern, she just followed the same pattern she'd already decided upon for all of them.

She got her trick words right, but those are written out, you just have to pick the right one for a sentence.

Then she was supposed to come up with new words using the sh phonogram. "If I can spell shop (sope, but she put the p backwards) I can spell ship (sipe), shot (sote), shut (sute), rash (rasp, p is backwards), fish (fise).

And she had to write two sentences from dictation. Unsurprisingly, she made far fewer errors in this:

tow brown cat (this is supposed to be cats, and she originally wrote can instead, bolstering my hypothesis about the hearing/brain connection) jump. (backwards j)

I ride to scool in a bus. (she wrote the b in bus like a line followed by a p, but the teacher didn't correct that.)

It probably didn't help that she developed a headache this afternoon (she says "right after the test"), but a headache should not have produced this amount of difference between what she did yesterday and what she did today. A difference in how the words were presented might make that difference, I think.

It also doesn't help that it apparently never occurred to her to go back and check your answers after writing them down. I asked, and she said she didn't re-read that first section after writing any of it.

Ana also had a spelling test today, but I don't know how she did yet. I know that on one of her homework assignments she wrote "friendlly" and nobody corrected it, which wouldn't be such a big deal except that friendly is one of her spelling words. And because nobody corrected her she tried arguing with me when I pointed it out to her, naturally. Her teacher checked it and didn't correct it! But as I pointed out, if friend has no l, and -ly has one l, zero plus one still only equals one.

Comments

[dragonwolf]

When was the last time Evangeline had her hearing checked?

Additionally, what are her "headaches" like? Are they headaches, or actually migraines (like, go hide in a dark room, under the pillows, because the sounds and light make you want to puke)? (I recommend going by her behavior vs what she said, particularly if she's the type that won't tell you she's sick even as she's bent over the toilet.) If it happens to be the latter, the spelling issues could be an aura, the precursor to a migraine. Perhaps you could see if the teacher would let her retake the test (even if it's not actually for a grade), to see if the post-test headache was connected? (I say use the teacher so you have the presentation of the words the same as during the test.)

It is, of course, also possible, that it was just test anxiety, but it might be worth looking into. Migraines suck, especially as a kid.

[conuly]

Last spring, during a routine checkup and also, I think, as part of her evaluation for speech therapy.

She doesn't seem very unwilling to tell us if she feels sick, and as a comment on LJ says, she had a sore throat and a fever the day before (along with a headache), so I'm pretty sure she was actually just sick.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

She doesn't need to study more; she needs her hearing and auditory processing checked. I should think any teacher would realize that at a glance: she clearly was not hearing the words correctly. But her developing a headache right after the test popped up a Red Flag for me - I never heard any more about whether her Dad ever got checked for possible seizure disorder, but that might be a thing to mention when she goes to get checked.

English spelling and grammar are crazy; there are no consistent patterns, and children need to be told this, so they don't think it's just their own inadequacy that makes it make no sense. It's totally mad; there's method in the madness, but English is an art, not a science.

I just recently found out that my daughter, who's 22 and in college now, can't tell the parts of speech apart. She can't play Mad Libs, because she never knows what's a noun, what's an adverb - and NO explanation has ever made a lick of sense to her. Despite that, he's an excellent reader, a very good writer - she called to tell me her professor had praised her use of active verbs, and to ask what that meant, which is how I found out that she's never known what ANY of it meant.

I surmise it's because she understood a word to be always a noun, a verb, or whatever - that a word's role as a 'part of speech' was fixed, rather than a matter of what role it was playing in a particular sentence. Proper nouns are always nouns, but most of the others can be verbs. What part of speech is the word set? Almost any part one needs it to be. This whole things frustrates my poor girlie to literal tears, because it sounds to her like gibbering insanity.

She had similar trouble with spelling in second grade: her logical mind kept trying to find the logical pattern, and there isn't one. We found she could spell better in Gaelic than she could in English, and none of us even speak more than a little Gaelic. She still can't tell then from than - a lot of little things like that. For all her competence with languages, there's gaps in her processing circuits; she can't easily get past "this does not make sense" when it doesn't in fact make sense; when it's only the way it is because it haphazardly grew that way.

[conuly]

No, she was sick yesterday with a headache, a sore throat, and a mild fever. Her temperature was slightly elevated again when I picked her up from school today, I think that's where the headache came from.

(And it turned out I wasn't supposed to post about or know about seizure scares in any way. So we'll now stop discussing it.)

[conuly]

And it's good you mention auditory processing, I've been thinking on that a while, but it got pushed to the back burner after the schools decided her speech problem wasn't serious enough to require help.

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

Seconding this. The problems you're detailing are almost identical to the ones I experienced as a child (and still occasionally experience as an adult--my coping mechanisms are better now). It's definitely worth looking at.

Poor kid with the fever, I hope she feels better soon.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Proper nouns are always nouns

Are they now. I imagine you've never said, "Let me google that", then.

[conuly]

That's exactly why Google would prefer you say "Let me search on Google", because they don't want their trademarked proper noun to become genericised!

[pne.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is that, as I understand it, brand names are essentially proper adjectives, which are used in conjunction with a noun they modify (as in "I put a Band-Aid™ brand plaster on my wound", rather than simply "I put a Band-Aid on my wound").