[senco-forum] non reader

Has he been tested for dyslexia?  It sounds as if he might be dyslexic... if
he knows his letter sounds but is not applying them then he has not got the
concept of the alphabetic principle.  It is likely that he has a
phonological awareness deficit/s.  Use Sound Linkage to find out - the main
areas to check are phoneme blending, phoneme segmentation, rhyme awareness
and phoneme deletion.

He needs to be taught that letter sounds can be blended.  Start with two
letters - at, am, in, ig etc.  Then when he can blend those, move to
flashcards with those rimes on and work till he can say them as
automatically as possible. Then put a letter at the front of a rime - c=at,
m-at.  Work on patterns like that - ie a consonant, then a short vowel and a
consonant using rimes he can read from flashcards.  Then move to CVC
flashcards.  Play games with them.  Use Swap games.  Use Snakes and Ladders
etc and he only gets to roll the dice if he has read a word.  

Using whole words to teach reading is not generally the most effective
approach.  For more on that look at the DFeS site for the Rose report.

I could offer more help if asked.

Philippa

-----Original Message-----
From: senco-forum-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk
[mailto:senco-forum-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk] On Behalf Of Phil
Sent: 14 September 2006 14:59
To: senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk
Subject: [senco-forum] non reader

I was asked about a six year old boy who just hasn't 'got' reading - he's
been given simple repetitive books to 'read' with the same sentence on every
page like 'here is the monkey' and by the time he turns to the next page
he's forgotten what the sentence said - by the sixth repetition at the end
of the book he still hasn't got it or can recognize any of the words. He
knows about 75% of his letter sounds but not using them. Staff were
discussing if this was a weakness with visual/auditory/working memory - any
views? And also what to do about it. I suggested starting with e.g. five
words on flash cards and doing those repetitively, and making up a book
that's meaningful to him 'here is Mum' here is dad' etc. 

Any more  ideas?

Ta

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