What are IEP Goals for Spelling?

What are Individualized Education Programs, and what should be their goals in terms of spelling? Are there other strategies you can use?

Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) are an essential first step to helping students with disabilities meet all academic requirements at their grade level. They provide an outline of the student’s pedagogical needs and the aid they are required to receive in school, ensuring they can make quick and meaningful progress in the classroom.

IEPs set measurable goals that we can use as milestones in progress monitoring. When it comes to spelling, those goals will vary on a case-to-case basis, depending on each student’s reading skills, learning style, and weak points.

What is IEP, and how it helps improve phonics in children at different grade levels?

As we’ve said, Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) provide outlines of a disabled student’s educational needs. They are essentially special education programs that accommodate students with learning difficulties, including dyslexia. A good IEP will focus on the following:

• Providing the teacher with the student’s profile: All successful teaching plans must begin with proper assessment. The special education teacher must know the student’s abilities, strengths and weaknesses, learning strategies, and everything else that will be a factor in the classroom.
• Setting clear objectives: Long- and short-term goals are crucial for objective progress tracking, so a good IEP must be built around measurable milestones. In the case of dyslexia, reading and spelling goals will be the crux of the program.
• Describing all accommodations that the student will need: Not all students are the same, and each child comes to school with unique needs. Some also require assistive technology and extra worksheets to make gains, and a good IEP must take that into consideration.
• Coming up with a review and feedback strategy: As students keep meeting their goals, the teacher must provide them and their parents with comprehensive feedback. That ensures learners stay motivated and focused on achieving more long-term goals.

How do IEPs help with phonics?

Phonics is a teaching method designed to teach students relationships between sounds and spelling patterns. Phonics are essentially early on, that is, for students in the first and second grades, and especially for those students with reading difficulties who struggle with correct spelling and word decoding.

A well-structured IEP can remedy many of the problems faced by young children because it can provide them with the following:

• An individualized, targeted approach: As we’ve said, not all children struggle with the same issues. Some have trouble decoding information, some lack phonemic awareness, and some can’t learn spelling rules fast enough. Since IEPs are built around information gathered during the assessment process, we can determine what the best approach for each child is and what tools they might need to get over their obstacles.
• Structured and clear learning methods: IEPs follow detailed templates, allowing students and teachers to cover a lot of ground in the classroom systematically. With tons of short-term goals and frequent writing assignments, quizzes, and reading benchmarks, children stay motivated and willing to learn because constant encouragement is crucial in academic settings.
• A way to blend various language skills and integrate various assistive tools: One of the goals of every IEP is to speed up the child’s learning process. The best way to do that is to ensure they can learn many things simultaneously. That’s why teachers usually teach a blend of phonics, vocabulary, etc. They also allow for a bunch of assistive tools and apps that encourage individual studies.

A few examples of spelling IEP goals

When it comes to spelling, a good IEP must, first and foremost, be comprehensive. The child must get enough practice to progress, and constant revision is obligatory, even with simple words and seemingly straightforward rules, such as capitalization and spacing. In short, if the child is to learn how to spell properly, they must:

• Build phonemic and phonological awareness
• Learn to blend and manipulate sounds to spell words
• Learn how to spell polysyllabic words
• Figure out how to spell sight words that often don’t follow usual phonemic rules
• Learn how to recognize mistakes and self-correct

The 4 spelling strategies

Some children have trouble learning how to spell even if the IEP is seemingly well-organized. When weekly writing samples and homework just don’t cut it, you’ll have to introduce additional spelling instruction at home, which will encourage the child to study more independently.

Spelling programs

There are tons of spelling programs you can use to help children cope with dyslexia. Some of them include All About Spelling, Logic of English, and various programs based on Orton-Gillingham principles. These programs are all multisensory, explicit, and comprehensive. They can be used independently at home, and the step-by-step instructions they usually come with will make learning the ropes of the program a cakewalk.

Mnemonics

Learning how to make connections and seek patterns is one of the most important skills a child can develop. Naturally, it transfers well to spelling. If you can teach children how to create their own mnemonics, you’ll set them on the path to success. For example, they can associate short vowels with a certain type of color, or they can use rhymes to learn more complex words.

Lists of words

It’s often a good idea to focus on what’s more common than what’s hard first. Word lists, especially word frequency lists, will ensure the child reviews and revises their progress constantly. Over time, you can add more complex words or those that give the child the most trouble. You can even make lists of suffixes and digraphs, vowels and consonants, or even complete sentences.

Visual aids

A lot of children are visual learners. Using colors, pictures, and various symbols can be a great way to teach children how to make associations between specific sounds and letters. You can also use word cards, spelling trees, etc.

The goal of sight words and sight words recognition

A huge portion of reading is done mechanically. We look at the page and scan it for sight words, that is, those words we can recognize and understand immediately. Children need to learn how to recognize those words and know what they mean without sounding them out before dissecting and decoding them.

Learning how to recognize sight words increases reading fluency, makes the process a lot faster, and ensures greater reading comprehension because it lets the child focus on the meaning of their written sample as a whole instead of trying to divide it into chunks to be analyzed.

The most common sight words are pronouns, conjunctions, simple copulas, prepositions, and some common verbs and nouns.

Use assistive tech tools to increase vowel sounds pronunciation and phonics for younger children.

One of the best ways to teach phonics and encourage independent studying is to introduce the child to assistive tools, such as text to speech (TTS) programs, for example, Speechify.

Speechify is a TTS tool designed specifically for those with learning disabilities. It aims to provide the listener with lifelike, expressive AI voices in most world languages, as well as a comprehensive set of adjustable settings that will accommodate every learner’s needs.

You can use Speechify to sound words out or convert text into audio files to reinforce proper pronunciation models whenever the child encounters a new or unfamiliar word. Getting additional audio input will be an indispensable addition to their phonics instructions, as it will allow them to practice word recognition and learn sound-letter correspondences on their own.