Using Photographic Memory for Spelling

In the journey of teaching 2 children who are polar opposites I of course had one child who cared so much about correct spelling (to the unproductive point of constantly halting writing because he refused to spell a word wrong) and one child who is fantastic at invented spelling but struggled to remember actual spellings of words. 
I was doing a little research last week on how I could support her and to see if there might be effective activities that we could work into our day and I came across www.diannecraft.org. As one of her activities to support struggling writers was the following activity on spelling involving photographic memory - I figured it was worth a try. 

She explains that many children who struggle with writing and spelling struggle writing gate or auditory gate methods but can be successful when they are taught to use their photographic memory. She advised to choose words from the 1200 Most commonly misspelled words and give your child a pretest. Have them either write or just verbally spell the words to you so you can determine which they know and which they need to work on. 

Here is the excerpt from her blog post Daily Lessons for the Struggling Writer and Speller.

"When you have identified between 10-15 words that the child doesn’t know, (these words can also be taken from the papers they write), make up cards for these words, working with your child. On the cards, write the letters that they spelled correctly in black magic marker. Write the letters they misspelled in color. You often have to put a picture on those tricky letters. For example, in the word “Saturday”, have the “u” be a swimming pool with a stick figure person diving into it. You can glue stars, marshmallows, m & m’s, etc. on letters that don’t want to stick in the memory. At first the cards will be quite elaborate as you are training your child to use his/her photographic memory. After several weeks, you will find that you need to put less and less on the words, and the child still remembers it.

Once the cards are made, have your child sit in a chair with his/her eyes in an upward position. Put the card up high in the air, and point out a few letters or pictures, and direct the child to take a quick “snapshot” with his eyes. Do this for “five looks”. Then take it down and ask questions about the colors and pictures of the letters. Then ask the child to spell the word forwards and backwards. BACKWARDS spelling is extremely important to this process. If the child can’t easily spell the word backwards, he isn’t seeing a picture of it, and the word will quickly fade in his memory, even if he passes the weekly test. If the child continues to get a letter wrong, then put more “jazz” on that letter…using either more pictures, or a silly story. If you are working with only one child, you can do this process for every word, every day. Then take the test on Friday. Remember, that if the child is struggling with the word, always direct her eyes upward to access the photographic memory. If she is still struggling, then offer some visual clues, like “What are the colors of the letters?”  "

So we gave it a go. I just started with 5 words that I saw were being misspelled in her writing and created silly cards. My "hens" are yellow because it was easier to see than white. I tried to draw pictures that gave clues to smaller word chunks like "hat" and "hen". The "o" in people has a face... because people have faces lol. 

We did a little trial and error - for instance in the picture below you'll see my first attempt at the word because. She was still struggling to see it and specifically with the "au" part. So I redid the card and put the "au" in yellow to make it stand out more and provide a visual cue. 

Then she would take the cards and follow the instructions laid out in the Dianne Craft post. You guys - it worked for her so quickly! She learned the words with in the first few minutes. We still did the exercises each day and on the third day I introduced a few new words. 

It was very interesting for me to observe that when she was recalling the words she would subconsciously move her eyes upwards showing that she was accessing that photographic memory. 

She's loving making little books for everything right now so on the fifth day I had her create a spelling book and I asked her to write out the words. It was extremely easy for her to spell every word correctly. Now we're making our next set of cards! 

You guys! I'm so excited to have found something that is working so well for her! She is thrilled with her progress and justifiably so proud of herself. I'd love to hear what works for your kids! A quick note about my son... he has gotten better at going with the flow and doing invented spelling but when he wants to revise and figure out spellings of words I give him an iPad and he just asks Siri ;) I love it. 

~ Monique