[senco-forum] [SENco-forum] [SENco-forum] [SENco-forum] dyslexia

Good parents don't teach that M=McDonalds that is just what normal children
pick up.

 They are inquisitive beings and when they hear a sound and see the same
symbol repeatedly (hence the McDonalds!) they usually, if all is working
normally, put these together.  M=McDonalds   and eventually that M='mmm'
and that is the same sound as Mum,  money,  mug,  mat,  etc.,

 Thus if someone was being very unkind they could teach that the sound 'ah'
looks like this '$',    'n'=* and 'd'= %    so the word that we know as
'and' will to them looks like '$*%' although the word sound remains the
same.

I have seen a child with autism & a phenomenal memory  able to spell
anything with no phonics.  He has the word read to him then he uses letter
names R-O-V-E-R = rover   S-H-A-R-O-N- =Sharon and one correction is all he
needs to 'bank' a new word.  This is not normal and he reads anything at all
with little or no understanding.

Theorists - love them or hate them someone has to go out on a limb, make a
statement and then try to justify it.  This is fine as long as having taught
the spider to move left or right on command that we do not postulate that
spiders become deaf when their legs are removed!

It is postulated that some with dyslexia or more likely the auditory
processing aspect of this have an inbuilt delay - thus when they see a
letter and hear a sound it is not matched exactly  so  'pans'   is perceived
one letter late     - p  is ignored     'a' seems to make the sound 'p' and
'n' seems to make the sound  'a' and  's' sounds like 'n'.   This would be
easy to see if the ph/gr that they were perceiving were always the same,
like my $*% model, but the next word they see is :    'span' which using
their new code sounds like ' n - pa'   Very confusing.

Now this is where synthetic phonics might help to circumnavigate this
problem  - if you could blindfold a child from birth until they were taught
phonics!   Instead SP has to re-teach some children with learning
difficulties in the same way as it is re-teaching those for whom English is
not a first language be they Chinese, Indian or Eastern European, in just
the same way as dyslexia tutors teach initially if that is what is needed.
These students all need re-coding and take varying lengths of time to grasp
the concept as seen by the Ruth Miskin TV show.

However, some, and usually the ones with dyslexia go on to need 1:1 help.
Julie might argue that this happens in her system without a label - Wave
1/Wave 2 and then at the end of Wave 3 some 1:1 with.........a TA?  Most
LA's are resistant to the idea of using 'specialist' teachers.  These are
not magic they just have a lot of strategies up their sleeves and because
they have been using both formative + summative assessment much longer than
most class teachers they can find the route to individual success much
quicker.

Eventually I hope all teachers have this skill, but until then those with
dyslexia find themselves left high and dry until Wave 3 when their
self-confidence is shot to pieces and they have no love of learning - their
primary reason for being placed in a school. As while they may have grasped
the 44 phonemes they cannot manipulate them the same way that others can. My
daughter could not blend. She was taught clean phonemes but still used the
'schwa' to make cat/kerater/catter. Synthetic phonics is great in that it
does something similar to what dyslexia tutors have always done.  There is a
great downloadable chart here http://www.syntheticphonics.com/ showing not
only the 44 simple sounds, but explains the more complex variation similar
to the DI or other dyslexia based sound unit teaching lists.  In the end
blends were offered to my daughter as digraph units treating 'bl' etc in the
same way as 'ch' ie 2 letters to make one sound - problem gone. The same is
done for trigraph - 'dle'  or for 'tion/shun'.  It is not possible to use
left to right SP but a combination of SP/AP   for words such as
'c-a-n -dle.'

As for whole words they have to be taught as whole words with supports such
as colour or pictograms or whatever it take to make it stick otherwise how
do you deal with saw/was without having explain spelling rules.  As my
daughter says she knows all the complex variations & spelling rules just as
she knows all her punctuation marks -she just doesn't remember which one
goes where.  This is what is lacking for some when for others these
irregular words or spelling rules just 'are'.  They never have to be
consciously learned.  They just heard them, saw them and used them - no
phonics involved. As you say both whole words and phonics have a place. Its
just that I leave room for using whole word, SP & AP in whatever way the
child needs to learn

Sharon

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