hwo – this is how a 15-year-old dyslexic student of mine spelt ‘who’. Non-dyslexic people can start thinking: How on earth is that possible? First, there aren’t any words in the English language that start with ‘hw’, and they’ve seen and written the word ‘who’ countless times for years!

Clearly, the student remembered what letters are involved, they only got the order wrong, and as there is no true correspondence between the way we pronounce and spell this word, they just picked the spelling that seemed most likely at the time. In five minutes, they might take a different view.

Practising spelling is very difficult for dyslexics, the traditional ‘look, cover, write’ doesn’t seem to work for them. Even if they can remember them in the short term, they will easily be forgotten by the next day.

Although there is an abundance of spell-checker tools out there which can help dyslexic people, we can’t and shouldn’t give up practising and finding other ways to support our dyslexic child/student with spelling.

A way I’ve found quite effective is building online quizzes around a specific spelling issue. Quizzes can be quite efficient and provide less painful ways of practising.

Here is one of my quizzes that aims to practise ‘silent letters’, letters that are not pronounced in the word.

Feel free to try it yourself, or have a go with your child if it’s suitable for them (year 4+). You can take the quiz several times because a different set of questions come up each time.

Silent Letters Quiz

Happy quizzing.