Why Spelling Is Hard for Some Kids

A child who reads well and spells badly is one of the most common patterns in early primary school, and it is not a sign of low ability. Spelling asks for production with nothing on the page to work from, which is strictly harder than reading, where the word is right there.

The technique that helps most is say-tap-write: your child taps out the sounds in a word on their fingers, then writes one letter or letter team per tap while saying that sound aloud. Three channels working on the same word at the same moment.

What does not help, despite being the thing most of us were told to do, is writing the word out ten times. The correct spelling stays visible for all ten, so nothing is ever retrieved from memory.

Five minutes, most days, on three or four words rather than the whole list.

What does struggling with spelling actually look like?

It is rarely “cannot spell anything”. It usually looks like one of these:

• Spells a word correctly on Friday’s test and wrong in Monday’s writing.
• Writes the same word two or three different ways in one paragraph.
• Reads books far above the level they can spell at.
• Gets the first and last sound right and guesses everything in the middle.
• Avoids writing, or writes very short sentences using only safe words.

The last one is the one worth catching early, because it hides the problem. A child who only writes words they are sure of looks like a child with fewer mistakes.

None of these on their own mean something is wrong. A six-year-old spelling night as nite is doing something developmentally normal, and how spelling develops covers what to expect at each stage. This page is about what to do when the gap is real and is not closing.

Why writing it out ten times does not work

Copying keeps the answer in front of your child the whole time. Ten copies is ten repetitions of handwriting and zero of spelling, because at no point did anyone have to retrieve anything.

That matters more for a struggling speller than for anyone else. A child who finds spelling easy will pick up the pattern incidentally even from a poor task. A child who does not needs the practice to be doing the actual work, because they have fewer spare repetitions to waste.

There is a second cost. Writing a word ten times is a long task with a visible result, and for a child who is already behind, it is ten chances to see their own handwriting go wrong. The alternatives below are shorter and produce less evidence of failure, which is not a small thing at seven.

Word searches fail a struggling speller for the same reason. They will do one happily, because finding a printed word is much easier than producing one, and it will feel like practice to both of you. It is reading, and it is the specific way a week of effort can produce nothing.

How to teach spelling at home covers the method this replaces it with. What follows is what changes when a child finds it hard.

What does multisensory spelling actually mean?

All the channels working on the same word at the same time, not one channel chosen to suit your child. That distinction is the whole thing, and almost every article on this subject blurs it.

	What it means	Where it comes from
Multisensory instruction	Your child says the sound while writing the letter while hearing it. One word, several channels, simultaneously	The Orton-Gillingham tradition, standard in structured literacy teaching
Learning styles	Work out whether your child is a visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner, then teach mostly through that channel	A popular idea that the research does not support. See below

Orton-Gillingham describes an approach rather than a product: explicit, systematic, cumulative, and multisensory in the first sense. The techniques below all come from it.

Five multisensory techniques to try at home

All five take a pencil, your hands, or something already in the kitchen.

1. Say-tap-write. Tap the sounds out on your fingers, then write one letter or letter team per tap while saying that sound. This is the one to start with, and for many children it is the only one you need.

2. Letter tiles or magnetic letters. Building a word from tiles separates choosing the letters from forming them. For a child whose handwriting is also effortful, that halves the load and often reveals they knew the spelling.

3. Sand, salt or finger writing. Writing the word large with a finger in a tray of salt, or on a table. The value is the size and the movement, not the medium, so a finger on the kitchen counter works.

4. Air writing. Your child writes the word large in the air, saying each sound, while you watch and say it back. Good for a child who has had enough of paper.

5. Coloured vowels. Write the word with the vowels in a different colour. It puts attention on the part of the word that carries most of the errors, which for English spelling is almost always the vowel.

Pick one and use it for a fortnight. Rotating through all five is a way of looking busy without giving any of them enough repetitions to work.

Does multisensory teaching actually work?

Yes for the first meaning, no for the second, and the difference matters.

What is well supported is explicit, systematic teaching of how sounds map to letters. The National Reading Panel reported in 2000 that systematic phonics instruction improved spelling as well as reading, with the largest effects in the early grades. Using several senses at once is a sensible way to deliver that, and it is standard practice in structured literacy.

What is not supported is matching teaching to a child’s supposed learning style. Karoline Aslaksen and Håvard Lorås reviewed the studies that tested this properly in Frontiers in Psychology in 2018 and concluded that “across studies that have applied equivalent quantitative empirical research designs, no overall improvement in learning outcome when applying modality-specific matching of instruction was found.” The effects that do turn up are too small to mean anything.

Their review answers a call from Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer and Bjork’s much-cited 2008 paper, which set out the four things a convincing study of learning styles would have to do:

1. Screen the participants for their learning-style preference.
2. Assign them at random to matched or non-matched teaching.
3. Give everyone the same test at the end.
4. Show a crossover interaction, where visual learners beat auditory learners on visual teaching and the reverse holds on auditory teaching.

That fourth one is the test almost nothing passes. Without it, a study showing “visual learners did well with visual teaching” has not ruled out the much duller explanation that the visual teaching was simply better for everyone.

So if you have been told your child is a visual learner, nothing here is wasted. The reason to use several senses is not that your child has a type. It is that spelling itself needs all of them: hearing the sound, saying it, seeing the letter, writing it. Every child needs the whole set, which is why the techniques above use the whole set.

Be careful of anything sold on the promise of identifying your child’s style. The useful question is never which channel your child prefers. It is whether the teaching is explicit, in a sensible order, and repeated enough.

What if my child has dyslexia or ADHD?

These techniques come from the same tradition used with dyslexic learners, so they are a reasonable place to start whether or not there is a diagnosis. What usually changes is the number of repetitions and how explicitly each pattern is taught, not the technique itself.

For a child with ADHD, the changes are about the shape of the session rather than its content: shorter, fewer words, and no timers. A timed round converts a child who needs longer into a child who fails.

If you are wondering whether your child’s difficulty is more than the usual range, that is a conversation with their teacher and, if it goes further, a formal evaluation. Nothing on this page is a substitute for one, and no article can tell you whether your child has dyslexia.

For where the ordinary range sits, how spelling develops is the better page. For what “behind” means and what to ask a school, see what “behind in reading” actually means.

How much practice, and what progress looks like

Fewer words, more often, for longer than you expect. Three or four words, five minutes, most days. The instinct when spelling is not working is to add more practice on more words, and that is backwards: a child who finds it hard needs more repetitions of less material.

Progress will not show up first as correct spellings. It shows up as the errors changing shape:

• From missing sounds to all sounds present. nt becoming nite for night is a whole vowel gained, and it is real progress even though both are wrong.
• From random to plausible. A wrong spelling that could be an English word means your child has learned what English spellings look like.
• From every word to some words. Errors concentrating in a pattern you have not taught yet is the best sign on this list.

Expect this in months rather than weeks, and expect Fridays to look better than Mondays for a long time. That gap closing is the thing to watch.