[senco-forum] Ruth Miskin's Fresh Start

One of Y5 kids came along to my office this week - previously a shy child
with low self-esteem, she was confident and smiling.  She apologised for
opening my door and interrupting a meeting and said she would come back and
so disappeared quite quickly.  We found each other soon after... "Thank you
Mrs Bodien, for choosing me to go into the booster group." was what she had
come to say.  All smiles.  She has had vision therapy and sound therapy.
She is now doing Fresh Start (taught by a member or our team) and
volunteering to me that this is really helping her to understand her class
work.

Her Mum had had no idea that she was coming to see me to say thank you but
when I chatted to Mum she said it as if the child has opened up to learning.

Certainly made my day/week/month.

Philippa

On 10/26/07, Paul and Philippa Bodien <bodien at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Or perhaps, in some cases there is an actual block which it takes a
> trained eye to spot?  No teaching system works if there is a block.  Here is
> a list of some I have come across:
>
>
>    - glue ear/hearing/auditory processing - solution Dr, sound therapy,
>    strategies
>
>
>    - vision issues - eye test, behaviroual optometric test and possibly
>    then visiontherapy and/or glasses
>
>
>    - ADHD - solution - Ritalin - have seen this work wonders for 3
>    children in past 19 years (not pro drugs but when all else has been tried
>    and the dr knows his/her stuff...).
>
>
>    - sensory-motor issues - assessment and therapy by an occupational
>    therapist
>
>
>    - an inability to discriminate rhyme - solution - work exclusively
>    on rhyme until the kid gets it then teach word families etc...
>
>
>    - an inability to transfer phonic knowledge from words taught to
>    other words with the same patterns - solution - teach nonwords until the
>    pattern transfer was facilitated
>
>
>    - a difficulty with the sequencing of letters within words -
>    solution - to arrange words in alphabetical order by 2nd, 3rd or 4th letter
>
>
>    - an over-reliance on the shape of the word, the context of the
>    language and a lack of applying the phonic skills carefully taught and
>    firmly in place - solution - used multi-fonted text to break down reliance
>    eon visual skills which were learning to a very poor accuracy of decoding
>    and to move the phonics skills away from just learned to being applied.
>    This got terrific, measurable and separately verified results in reading
>    accuracy, reading speed and comprehension.
>
>
>    - Short-term memory - could not retain ideas long enough to get them
>    onto paper despite excellent ability and preparation of work - solution -
>    Omega 3 supplement and use of laptop to write.  Touch typing, Dragon
>    Dicatate Naturally Speaking
>
>
>    - a difficulty to retain and apply learned phonics - solution -
>    Acceleread Accelewrite shifted this boy's single word reading level from the
>    1st percentile to the 24th.  His nonword reading was already there but he
>    wasn't applying this skill.  Follow up work involved lots of phonically
>    controlled dictation of text using text to speech software (Write:Outloud)
>
> Poor old Miskin is getting quite a bashing!  Miskin is fabulous for those
> children who are going to learn given good teaching.  The 3% need trained
> help.  Martin Turner advised that Miskin is top of the line in reading
> schemes.  I agree... but do not like the way she splits some words into
> syllables as she does not allow for open syllables such as mo in motor.  But
> that is a minor point - real hair splitting!
>
> In my experience, any system that teaches grapheme to phoneme
> correspondences and vice versa plus blending and segmenting is likely to be
> a winner for most children, as the Rose review clearly states.
>
> And if this system is failing the child then teach differently to take
> their needs into account - whatever it takes to get success.  The children's
> responses are great indicators.
>
> When the horse is dead the best method is to dismount.
>
> Philippa
>
>
> On 10/26/07, Jeff Hughes <jeff at box42.com > wrote:
> >
> > Perhaps we have a variant on the Pareto (80/20) rule at work here with
> > the
> > "freshness" of the approach and the beliefs of the users being the key
> > factors?
> >
> > .... and if it works use it but monitor progress to identify when you
> > need
> > to switch strategies!
> >
> > Jeff
> >
> >
> > >>>>
> > ===============================================
> >
> > Jeff Hughes, Chartered Educational Psychologist
> > Chartered IT Professional   Chartered Scientist
> > Principal Practitioner       psychologist.co.uk
> > Box42 Ltd          Email: jh at psychologist.co.uk
> > ===============================================
> > >>>>
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