Tag Archives: Spelling

When the Road to Reading Gets Rocky: Other Resources

In our series about what to do when your child is having trouble learning to read, today we talk about a variety of other resources for teaching spelling and getting help.

The next two weeks we will have interviews with good representatives to a couple of important providers.

Please feel free to share other resources that you have found that have helped your children/students.

New Book Announcement – English Spelling Patterns


I wrote this first for my grandsons. I have never seen spelling taught in an organized, sensible fashion. Well, except once: my friend was teaching her preschooler at home and started with cat, rat, bat. So sensible. Never done.

Later, I discovered that many students could not intuit the rules like I could. Give me a word and I normally can guess how it is spelled. Many can not do that. So why not teach them the rules? I discovered that the Orton-Gillingham Method for teaching students with dyslexia does this, at least to some extent. So it was not until I was grown, with all my education, many degrees, and had a daughter in junior high and in a program for remediating Dyslexia, that I heard “when 2 vowels go walking, the first one does the talking, and says its name.”

I also realized that all Montessori teachers will need this, since all they have is the basic “what you see is what you get” from Montessori, who spoke Italian — a wysiwyg language.

Then I discovered that some very well educated ESL students appreciated the work. So now it is available on Amazon and Kindle for everyone.

Enjoy. Share.