Today a second-grade student was having some difficulty doing an entry logging her Abe Lincoln book into her Literary Journal.
Noting that she was copying the teacher’s model letter by letter (or 2 letters at a time max), I asked her how many letters she thought she could copy after really looking at a word. I’d show her a whole word or word part, she’d look at it, then she said, “Go!” I would cover the original and she would write the letters from her visual memory. We progressed easily from 2 to 3 to 4 and finally copying 5 letters at a time.
Visual-Sequential Memory can be taught right at this age, but actual visual memory for whole words (eidetic memory) takes a couple of years longer (especially for girls). She’s ready to do this “Look-Cover-Write” exercise with 4- and 5-letter words. In fact, students can do longer words if there is an –ing at the end, which they know as one unit.