Stop Climbing, Start Swimming: The hidden advantages of dyslexia: Johnathan Buchanan

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Dyslexia: Multi-Sensory Learning - Mind-Map

Multi-Sensory Study Skills in Mind-Map form.

Visual Spelling - Let Me Learn

This is a great way to help children with their spellings.  Especially if they are visual learners and they are getting bored,  fedup or refusing to do their spellings.

All you need is some coloured paper, scissors, glue and your imagination.  Split the words by sound chunks like ‘ch’ or ‘ea’ or like in ‘make‘ the a-e makes the long a-e sound.

Let children decide how they want to remember their words as this will help them remember better when they do the test in class.

Let Me Learn is a special educational needs shop providing fun dyslexia resources for teachers and parents.

Visual Spelling

Teaching Number Bonds

Number bonds.
An extract from the SJBWriting blog:
 
"We all use them in our adult life without even realising it. When adding up items in our basket at the supermarket, we know that 3p and 7p is 10p, and that 2x 50p is £1.

When we buy something for £5.60 at the market and hand over a £10 note, we know that £5.60 + 40p is £6 and another £4 makes £10, so we know to expect £4.60 change.

Knowing our number bonds is extremely useful, but a lot of children struggle to learn them.

Over the years I have successfully taught many children how to remember their number bonds. As with times tables, the key is to find multi-sensory ways to teach, and to make practising fun.

Some children respond very well to visual clues, and to help these I use colour sticks.

These are strips marked out in 10 sections and coloured in contrasting colours, so that children can see clearly that 2 red squares plus 8 green squares equals 10 squares altogether, and that 8 green squares plus 2 red squares also equals 10 squares altogether.

They are small enough to hold in the hand, and I tend to use them in conjunction with other methods. The children I tutor find them really useful to refer to during games.

Snap and pelmanism are always popular games, and I have made two sets of cards for this. The first set is colour-coded, so when the children turn the cards over there is a visual clue as to whether the two cards add up to 10.

When they turn over the first card, I encourage them to work out what number they need to find to make 10.

When the children are a little more confident I switch to the black and white ones to remove the visual clue, but we still play the same games to keep some familiarity."

If you find this interesting and want to read more of this article, go to SJBWriting

English Games to improve literacy

A great way to command children's attention is through fun educational games. These teaching resources introduce and revise English subjects with children aged 5 to 15 years.

Starting with the alphabet and progress through English grammar and vocabulary using board games, puzzles, story telling, handwriting games and rescue packs.

Visit the Keen-to-Learn website and decide for yourself!

An Introduction to Letters, Numbers and Geography on the Apple iPad - Montessorium

Learn the shapes, names, flags and geographical locations of the countries in North America, through puzzles, challenges and drawing exercises. Based on the proven methodology of Montessori.

Your Child Will Learn

✔ To identify the countries of North America
✔ To discern the shapes of the countries
✔ To recognize the flags of North America
✔ The development of spatial relationships
✔ Fine motor skills and vocabulary

Read more and explore the information on Montessorium

The Prentice School - Slingerland Informational Video on Dyslexia

These videos show a brief description of the Slingerland Multisensory Structured language training and its effectiveness in the classroom brought to us by the Slingerland Institute for Literacy.

To view more videos on the Slingerland Method and the Prentice school, click on this link

To read more on the Slingerland Method of teaching children with Dyslexia, click here

To read the Slingerland research listing, click here

Example of an Orton Gillingham Lesson - Pride Learning Centre

The Orton-Gillingham method of reading instruction was developed in the early-20th century. It was developed to teach struggling and non-readers how to read and write. The program works with all students, especially those with dyslexia, auditory and visual processing disorder and ADHD.

Students are taught spelling simultaneously with reading. Because each student has a different learning style, all lessons are taught by seeing, saying, moving, hearing and touching the concept being taught. This is known as multisensory teaching.

The Race to the Top may be Leaving Teachers Behind

There are some great teachers, and even some great Teacher Preparation programs, but these are random occurrences where consistency is essential. The reason is simple: Professional Education is missing fundamental standards found in all other professions.

There is no standard curriculum, no sincere effort to identify Best Instructional Practices, and truckloads of weak consultants and players with diluted degrees serving up their own brands of Faculty Development. To be called a profession it is imperative that a profession, one way or another, needs to convene a rolling forum to collect and prioritize the core content of principles and practices that every member ought to know.

Ironically, Teachers worldwide are being held to standards for annual yearly progress of their students. Meanwhile, Professors, Learned Societies & commercial schools, and some painfully self-serving non-profit foundations and Universities never even address the need for solid pedagogic content.

Worse, those that do publish material under titles referencing Best Practices are quite simply hype, if not fraudulent. The current crop of in-charge “Leaders” dangerously resembles the Investment Bankers who remain in charge of the economic systems that they nearly bankrupted.

Perhaps the only way to expose and reform this systemic disaster would be a class action by teachers &/or parents & students against all of us who have been complicit in these myriad layers of self-interest actions bordering on malpractice.

Since the likelihood of legal action is a remote idea it would be wonderfully unprecedented for a leveraged agency to hold a convention of the nation’s leading educators to consider and ideally endorse a covenant of principles and more importantly prescriptive practices ideally on a website that transparently allows these to be challenged, tweaked and further specified for different age-grade-situational conditions.

Additionally, such a rolling convention also could address differentiated staffing based on what schools are expected to do, and with a differentiated set of Best Practices for each function, like doctors and nurses, attorneys and paralegals, etc..

Schools are expected to carry-on three essential although overlapping functions: 1. Teach new concepts, content and a positive disposition toward self-directed learning; 2. Provide assessment and supervised practice in these objectives; and, 3. Operate a massive custodial role that keeps students in school for at least seven-nine hours a day for about 200 days a year for about 13 years, and now through at least 2 more years of college.

Our labour market and economic system depend on schools to meet these criteria at the very least. The problem is not the expectations, but that staffing, and organisation do not reflect these three societal essentials. And, sadly there is no real free market in ideas where one can buy into pre-sifted best practices and principles.

Meanwhile, please consider joining the websites below offering a potentially startup (heuristic) means of getting the current system moving in the right direction for all who teach. As an aside, taxpayers would be grateful since increasing classroom effectiveness and adding differentiated staffing could bring about efficiencies that could save billions of dollars with even the smallest degree of adoption. Please join the narrative.

http://teacherprofessoraccountability.ning.com/main/invitation/new?xg_source=msg_wel_network And… http://bestmethodsofinstruction.com/

Anthony V. Manzo, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus avmanzo@aol.com

Multisensory Teaching

Studies from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development have shown that for children with difficulties learning to read, a multisensory teaching method is the most effective way for these students to learn.

 

Multisensory teaching means the teacher must tap into all learning modalities – see it (visual), feel it (tactile), hear it (auditory) and move with it (kinesthetic).

 

Here are a few suggestions on how to make spelling lessons fun, creative and engaging.

• Trace words with a pencil or pen while spelling the word. Then trace with an eraser. Get up and do 5 jumping jacks. Now write the word and check for accuracy.
• Write the words by syllables in different colored markers.
• Pair up with another student and write words on each other’s back with a finger. Have the partner guess what the word is.
• While sitting on a carpet, write down each word directly onto the carpet with two fingers.
• Trace over each word at least three different times in different color crayons so that the words look like rainbows.
• Pair up with another student and take turns jumping rope while spelling the words out loud.
• Clap your hands to each letter as you spell the words out loud.
• Type each of the words in 5 different fonts, colors, and sizes.
• Bounce a ball to each letter in the word.
• Practice writing the words with neon gel pens on black paper.
• Write the words on individual chalkboards using colored chalk.
• Finger-paint the words using frosting on wax paper or paper plates.
• Spell the words using alphabet manipulatives such as magnetic letters or letter tiles.