David the ten-year-old was a terrible speller. He would take weeks to finish a spelling lesson that took his older sister only days to master. And yet in other areas of life, he has the most phenomenal memory in the family: if anything is lost, we ask David, because he can search his visual databanks and pull up anywhere he has seen it. He can see something once and later reconstruct it in legos.
It finally occurred to me that maybe his 3-D memory is better than his 2-D memory. So I began having David build his spelling words out of legos first, before trying to write them out.
The result? Overnight success: David mastered his next spelling lesson in one day. The next lesson took only two days. He tells me that he can not only spell the word, but he can picture in his head the different colors of the legos that went into each letter.
Weird. And neat.
[By the way, I did screen him for dyslexia, and he turned up negative. I don’t really know what goes on in his incredible brain.]