Out of four tests - a total of 48 words - Brady missed five. Of those five, three were simply because he wrote a 'b' instead of a 'd' or vice versa. He knew how to spell the word. He just wrote those letters backwards.
Overall, he's doing really well at spelling, but we needed to address this problem. We did it in two ways:
I had to look up the spelling of this! In a spelling post! That seems ironic.
Anyway, according to Merriam-Webster, a mnemonic is "assisting or intended to assist memory." For now we use it only for spelling, but I'll bet down the road it will be useful elsewhere.
We did this a lot last year. For example, "together" was to-get-her. He spelled it right and still knows how. And "enough" is eno-ugh (sounds like eeno-ugg). This worked wonders for Brady, especially coupled with the letter scramble and repetition.
This year, 'b' and 'd' were vexing us. So I came up with another mnemonic which capitalized on his love of Star Wars: "Death star to the left, Boba Fett to the right." It took him awhile to get it down pat, but soon he could say it and knew it meant D was to the left and B was to the right.
Every night for two weeks I wrote a capital D and capital B at the top of a paper and then 1. 2. 3. under each one. So he'd practice writing each one in lower case three times.
When he was tested over his word bank, he didn't miss any.
I thought these simple techniques might help someone else with spelling woes as much as they helped us.