Because of my travels this week, I did not have an opportunity to work with any students so the problem comes from a teacher in Indianapolis who finds that some of her low level readers struggle with the words sense and scent.  These words are confusing because they sound similar and, although the spelling is different enough for most people, the spelling of these words are difficult for individuals who have blurred hearing (auditory perception problem) and/or a right/left problem that make it difficult to distinguish the difference between items that are similar.  Distinguishing between these two words is a familiar problem for young children, but if the difficulty persists into adulthood the significance of the problem is exacerbated by frustration. 

The word scent can be weighted with a mnemonic clue to help individuals who have difficulty distinguishing the words sense and scent when reading or writing.  The person looks for the word cent in scent and associates the idea of money with smell.  A saying like, “It cost a lot of cents to buy perfume, a powerful scent”, can be used to remember the word scent and to weight it for memory.  For those of you who are new to the Mnemonic Clue of the Week, weighted learning is a memory technique for remembering one part of a pair.  By knowing how to recognize the word scent, the person eliminates the confusion between scent and sense.