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Week 6 Study skills, aids and accommodations

Weeks 6 Summary Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing University of London, UCL Institute of Education & Dyslexia International The focus of week 6 is to supply more suggestions for study skills, aids, and accommodations. Most of the accommodations were reiterated from earlier weeks' lessons: extra time bigger font size, sans serif computer usage when possible give definitions and teach spelling of discipline specific vocabulary print on one side of the paper only (not two sided) don't take marks off for spelling  spelling tests can be limited to words the child thinks she  has  memorized questions can be read aloud, if the reading itself isn't what you are evaluating evaluate only one aspect of the writing assignments, where possible (punctuation, content, syntax, grammar) be tolerant of digit reversal in mathematics give dyslexic child a summary with a few key words omitted while other children are writi

Week 5 More on Practical teaching approaches

Weeks 5 Summary: More on Practical teaching approaches Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing University of London, UCL Institute of Education & Dyslexia International This week, Dr Goetry demonstrated the multisensory teaching of reading in classrooms, assessing phonological awareness via genration, substitution, concatination [and five others which are...], helping students with comprehension an d compostiong. His students appeared to be first graders, and the class ran through a number of exercises. First, they touched letters while blindfolded, trying to sound out the word presented with them. In the next lesson, they used legos or checkers or other counters to count out syllables: three for “kangaroo”, etc. Or, they put a hand below their jaws, and counted out the number of times that their jaws hit the top of their hands for “go ril la”. Then they clapped out “a lli ga tor. Next, they were given a list of words on paper, took a pencil, and

Week 4 Practical teaching approaches

Weeks 4 Summary Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing University of London, UCL Institute of Education & Dyslexia International As Dr. Goetry laid out early in this week, the opacity of the language matters. In 2003, Seymour and research collaborators compared reading acquisition in European first graders across 15 different languages, and the results were as follows: 34% of English speaking children can read words and pseudowords correctly. In French, it was 79%, Italian 95%, and German 97%. Not surprisingly, children taught with the phonics method did 20% better than those taught with the “whole word” method. He references the studies that show that “whole word”, or the global method, is more successful in higher socioeconomic strata, while no such difference in success rates exists for phonics methods. Dr. Goetry spent a lot of this week discussing effective teaching of reading. He gave the following requirements for effective teaching: it

Week 3 “Co-morbidity”, and psychological and social aspects

Summary of Week 3 of the Coursera Course Helping Students with Dyslexia Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing University of London, UCL Institute of Education & Dyslexia International Dr. Jenny Thomson discussed auditory and visual issues, stressing the difference between pitch (frequency) and loudness (amplitude), and how that can affect dyslexic students. She mentioned that the visual stress of reading is an issue discussed in the UK and Europe, perhaps more than elsewhere. The balance between attention issues and dyslexia can sometimes give contradictory recommendations. For example, a dyslexic child can often perform better in comprehension when read to, because he doesn't have to alott all of his attention to decoding. On the other hand, if the child has attention issues, she might need the reading to be in front of her, so she has someplace to anchor her comprehension. A child who is both dyslexic and has attention issues  might  do bes

Week 2 Definitions and identification of dyslexia

Below is a summary of information I found most useful from the University of London's Coursera course,  Reading capabilities can be represented in simplified form by quadrants, where one axis represents language comprehension, and another represents decoding.  This gives four general categories:  children who have no difficulty at all children with difficulty decoding, but not comprehending (“dyslexia”) those with difficulty comprehending, but who can read the text on a mechanical level (“specific comprehension deficit”) and those who struggle both with comprehension and with decoding. Dr. Goetry talked about the importance of asking parents and grandparents about their own relationships with reading, because dyslexia and its diagnosis were less common than they are today. How well does the child distinguish left from right? Is she ambidextrous? Are rhymes difficult to provide? Are multiple directions difficult to follow? Is time difficult to estimate? Does t

Week 1 An overview of Supporting children with difficulties in reading in writing

Week 1 An Overview Dr. Vincent Goetry went through the Uta Frith model of reading development: the LOGOGRAPHIC stage, the ALPHABETIC stage, and the ORTHOGRAPHIC stage. The logographic stage means children can recognize words as pictures, such as STOP on a red stop sign, or the shape of their name. The alphabetic stage requires that children understand that words can be broken up into smaller phonemic units. The child also needs to understand that the language spoken relates to the language written, and that the link as from oral phonemes to written graphemes. The orthographic stage [look up definition of orthographic stage] allows the child to see the written symbols (graphemes) and immediately and automatically, wholistically, recode them in her brain as sounds (phonemes). After maybe the 10 th  or 20 th  time seeing the word “school,” for example, she might know without going through the several step process of recognizing the letters, recognizing the grapheme groupi

Summary of the Coursera Course Helping Students with Dyslexia

Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing University of London, UCL Institute of Education & Dyslexia International This course, offered by Dr Jenny Thomson and Dr Vincent Goetry with the University of London, gave me a semester's worth of actionable information on dyslexia and learners with dyslexia.  I encourage everyone to attend this course. But it can be a sizable commitment, so I am writing a series of blog posts summarizing the contents of each week. Brief description of what it took to complete this course: It took me approximately four months to complete. I had several policy texts, and one or two academic texts, to read as pdfs, as well as a short film re-enacting the experiences of dyslexic children in school in Europe (including the UK), an hour long discourse about the neurology of reading by Dr Dahaene, and a couple dozen hours of informative lectures by Dr Jenny Thomson and Dr Vincent Goetry of the University of London, UCL Insti

Apple Painting Lesson

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Recently, I had an interview for an art teacher position at Upward Bound in Utah. I asked the internet for a lesson plan, and Mr. Matt Christenson supplied. Thank you, Matt ! Here is my painting: I used these materials: 1 spray bottle 3 brushes (1.5 inch boar hair student brush, .3 cm mink hair square brush, 1 cm acrylic chisel edged brush) 1 flat metal palette knife 1 gallon ziplock bag for my palette 1 plastic picnic plate 2 old socks 1 glass jam jar acrylic paints: cadmium red hue, cadmium orange hue, cadmium yellow hue, dark cobalt blue, titanium white, vivid lime green Strathmore mixed media vellum finish paper notebook 4 sturdy rubber bands 1 apple Ultramarine blue pastel crayon A word about brushes: wipe them on the old sock in the direction of the brush – metal to tip, away from the handle – pretty thoroughly before cleaning them in water. Before you use them, put your brush in clean water (a drop of soap in the cup of water won't hurt) and

The Saga of the Beginning Violinist

The first part of Emile's nightly violin lesson is the easiest, though least fruitful: asking him to go get his violin to start the lesson. It's easy, because I only have to repeat the request a few dozen times, without any further work on my part. It's fruitless for the same reason – at least until the moment when I hit the sticking point, and he finally goes to get the instrument. I tune it. Then comes the struggle to get him to stand straight, hold the violin correctly. He has a tendency to want to melt. Getting his bow arm not to flap out behind him like a chicken wing is a struggle, as well, because it bugs him to have his elbow touched. As a violinist myself, I can sympathize; I hate having my bow arm touched while I'm playing. He's fairly good about correcting his pitch when I point it out, though “up” and “down” and “flat” and “sharp” are still fuzzy terms for him.  The real trouble comes in getting him to repeat a section, play it differently.

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