DOT'S DIARY

Sunday
Tracy suffers from low self-confidence and takes what other say to heart. If another child (or teacher, and it has happened) says that Tracy is stupid, she really believes it and I have to start reassuring her all over again. As she suffers from low self-confidence she uses various strategies to avoid what is difficult. She "forgets" books and must get them from her locker, she drops her pencil on the floor and takes a while to return to her chair. She will ask to go to the bathroom (she uses this for two reasons, i.e. to avoid starting work and to think about the instruction from the teacher). Sometimes this avoidance can cause problems with teachers and at home, e.g. she did not complete an English homework sheet (as she believed she couldn’t do it) and, when asked for it, said she hadn’t done it; she then had to complete it along with another worksheet. This of course compounds the problem because she believes that if she were not so stupid she would not have been in trouble

However, when I did the confidence-building exercise with her, Tracy was surprised that there were more items in the 'Good at' column. She said she felt glad that she was good at so many things, and of the things in the 'Not so good at' column math and spelling were the only two important things! She took a copy of the table and pinned to the door in her room so that she can look every day and see what she is good at. She also taped a copy inside her homework diary. We also left blank boxes so that she can add things to the list as time goes by. Later that day, she telephoned her dad at work to tell him all the things that she is good at and left the room afterwards with a big smile on her face.

Monday
When I tested K on her reading level, she scored at the reading level of a four and a half-year-old. At present, K is 7 years old and is three years below reading level for her age group. Reading group has always been an issue with K; she lacks in concentration and is unable to stay on the same page with her peers when reading. She will always be looking at the previous page or not paying attention when it is her turn to read.

In order to help her reading I started a “Jump start” reading time with her. Three times a week she comes to class ten minutes before the school bell rings. We sit together and go through the book. I give K enough time in the beginning to look through the book and all the pictures first. We then talk about what the story might be about. If, in advance, I see words that I know K will struggle sometime I do a pre-lesson by writing the word on a small white board and talking about the silent letters or irregular spellings (e.g. ph sounds). I also try to read the story first to K; then we take turns reading together. She reads a page, then I will. With K and other children I tell the word if the child is struggling to read. What a difference! Less stress for the children and of course for myself.

Tuesday
Nobody likes to be a nagging, critical parent, and a constant stream of ‘Don’t do this and don’t do that’ goes in one ear and out the othe. But I would strongly urge parents to pick up on any incorrectly spoken words as soon as they hear their dyslexic child say them. Dyslexic children have difficulty distinguishing the slight differences in the sounds of words; for example instead of ‘Once upon a time’ one of my pupils heard ‘Wallah wallah time’, and instead of ‘Amsterdam’, she heard ‘Hamster day’! Hearing the words correctly means that a child will be more likely to spell the words correctly.

Sunday
I was able to attend both a literacy and numeracy lesson to observe George's posture. During numeracy he sat upright and listened attentively. He is right handed and supported the book with his left hand when writing.

However in the literacy lesson George spent most of the time with his left hand supporting his head, or with his head laid on the table as if it were all too much to cope with. He would rub his face, fiddle with his pencil or rock about on his chair. I encouraged him to sit closer to the table with a more upright posture. When he did this his writing was neater with less pencil pressure. I have followed this up when he has been doing his homework. This good posture is becoming more natural now and he appears less tensed up when dealing with writing tasks.

Tuesday
One child I teach is 11 years old. She has been diagnosed with dyslexia. She has great difficulties with her right and left and easily confuses them. When asked to show me which is her right hand and which is her left, she isn’t able to answer straight away. She will take a little time to look at both hands and then answer. When she does answer, she gets them the wrong way around.

Every time she does this I try to get her to remember that she writes with her right hand and so every time she wants to find her right hand she lifts up the hand she writes with. This will be a good strategy for her, but with short-term memory problems it will take some time for her to learn this strategy.

When I ask her more complicated questions such as 'Touch your right ear with your left hand', she has even more trouble. She tries to work out which is her right hand and sometimes needs help with this; then she works out which is her left ear. The biggest problem for her then was to combine both instructions; she found this extremely difficult and required a lot of help to do it.

So, as part of the session every week we spend some time on right and left. To start with we do the “Hokey Cokey” dance and she really enjoys this. It’s great for teaching right and left as it’s repetitive and multi-sensory but most of all because it’s so much fun. I stick right and left stickers on each arm and leg so she knows which is which. As she got better at the dance I removed the stickers but she still needed some reinforcement.

Though she might never completely overcome her right/left confusion, hopefully she will learn strategies that will help her deal with her difficulties

Wednesday
In class, I have established a target-setting program for learning spellings, which will enable the child to look at the list of given words for the spelling test, and decide how many she thinks she will be comfortable learning that week. Whilst others choose 20 words, the dyslexic child chooses 5. However, when the tests are marked, she achieves her 5-word target, which is as much as the achievement of those children whose target is 20. Children are then rewarded merit points in line with their own target settings, NOT by the number out of 20 they have achieved. Therefore, the dyslexic child is not penalized for her inability but praised for her achievement. This, I found to be a very excellent method.

Monday
Jim is in a class of 32 children, and he is not the only one with learning difficulties. It is a difficult class. The class teacher has two assistants who are not trained, and have no understanding of dyslexia. Jim is constantly shouted at and told how lazy he is. He has a daily behaviour report book to take home to show his parents how “naughty” he is.

One criticism he hears daily is “You lazy boy! All you’ve got to do is copy from the board and you can’t even do that.”

Another one is “You’re so horrible to everyone, any wonder they won’t play with you.” He often hides his homework spelling list and is then told “You are so naughty, I think you hid the list so you could just watch T.V. all night.”

“Why don’t you learn your tables? All the other children do.” These are just samples of things I have heard said to this child

Thursday
I feel that one of the most important ways to work with Sally is to help her understand and be able to talk about her dyslexia. It is hard for a person to work on a weakness or improve upon something that is causing trouble, if she doesn’t even know what it’s about.

When I first started working with Sally, we made a chart of "Things that I am good at" and "Things that I am not so good at". From this posted chart, Sally could readily see that she does have a lot of things that she is good at. We look at the chart when we are planning ways for Sally to use her strengths, as well as ways to work on the things she’s not as good at, all in order to improve her output at school.

Friday
Jo has problems copying from the board; he has expressed to me that he never has enough time to copy assignments from the board. He said that he looses his place. He will write an assignment that does not make sense because he left off some of the information. Most recently Jo had problems copying math problems from the board, they were problems that needed to be lined up correctly so that he could multiply the columns. He left off part of the number and they were not lined up correctly, he could not even do the problem.

I called the resource room teacher to discuss my concern over his situation. She now copies all math problems for him, because it is in his IEP as an accommodation. She also gave him graph paper and showed him how to line up the numbers when he did the problem so he could add his columns. Teaching him to get help (when something needs to be copied for him) and then to be careful when doing the problem has made a difference for him. He is not as frustrated and he can do the work that he is expected to do. Jo also has trouble copying from a book, its basically the same problem.

Saturday
I put up a display in the classroom about differences. The whole class discussed the issue and contributed (race, hair colour, skin, eyes, religion etc) but no-one talked about learning requirements or disabilities. It was a good chance to talk to some of the pupils about these issues and remind them that we do not all find learning easy nor do we learn in the same way.

Tuesday
One new child that I observed in class is eight years old, very quiet and occasionally withdrawn to the point of not speaking to anyone, including his peers. When the other children are sitting on the carpet during the introduction to the lessons, he is very often hiding under the tables and takes a lot of encouragement to get him out. When asked to do literacy tasks, he wastes a lot of time preparing himself, sharpening his pencil or getting a ruler, delaying the task in hand. When he settles down, if he thinks the task is too hard he puts his arm across his book so that no one can see it, and pretends to write. When asked if he would like to be helped, he says he cannot do it and dissolves into tears. Some days he is not so tearful but wastes a lot of time during the lesson disrupting others. Fortunately, his parents are very supportive and I am hoping for some rapid progress with him.

Wednesday
I was speaking to John, one of my pupils, today, and asked him: Do you find that you have enough time to copy from the board? He replied: "Most of the time it is OK. If I realise that the teacher is going to ask us to copy from the board, I start copying before she tells us to, so I finish. Some of the teachers, however, only give us a little time at the end of the lesson and then if I don't finish I have to ask my friend so that I can finish copying from his book."

Do you sometimes lose your place when you are looking down at your paper and back at the board? "Sometimes it happens, but this year it is better that I am sitting right in front of the board. Also, this year teachers are not using the board so much."

I should mention that since I knew about John's difficulties beforehand, I had already made sure that he sits directly in front of the teacher and the board. Also, the teachers were advised to use a dark board marker and avoid using curly, joint writing, if possible. This helps John a lot.

Saturday
I usually try to comment on good teaching methods, but yesterday, I had the opportunity to observe a lesson that was so harmful for any dyslexic child in the class. Excuse my notes, but this is what I saw and wrote down:

• outline of lesson not explained at beginning of lesson
• the dyslexic children would mostly be found sitting at the back of the classroom where they could hopefully hide themselves
• they would be asked to read inappropriate texts out loud in class, really being set up to fail
• too many spellings to learn. When the spelling test was completed books would be swapped and the teacher would read out the spellings for pupils to correct. This was particularly difficult for the dyslexic child as they found it difficult to follow. The marks then had to be read out to the teacher
• the class had the same work, where the dyslexic child had difficulty he was classed as being a dunce or naughty
• no extra time was given for projects. No extra help when revising for exams. You either passed or failed
· tasks and instructions were not broken down into achievable targets and therefore the pupils were often accused of not listening
• they were often unable to copy from the blackboard and were again accused of not listening or concentrating. Sometimes suggestions about needing glasses would be made
• work marked down and then ridiculed in class
• often kept in after school to complete work

Tuesday
I have a student who reverses b/d, p/q, e/a, and n/u. I have gone back to 'square one' so to speak and introduced the letters over again using 'sky writing' (this requires more movement). At a later date when we have review we will use sandpaper to give it a more hands-to-brain connection. Once a week when we do a written spelling deck I will have the students use shaving cream. (Just spray a glob on a desk and the students smooth it out and are ready to write. They write a letter and erase by smearing out on their desk again.) Sometimes we will take a field trip to the parking lot and use sidewalk chalk. This way the child can make large letters just like sky writing but they see what is written. All of these methods reinforce the proper letter formation and direction.

Wednesday
When I introduced the idea of doing calculations aloud, my new student was not surprised to learn that it could help him remember things better. He immediately told me about how he always would say the problems aloud when doing his math homework or taking a test and how he frequently got in trouble by the teacher. He said that the teacher once took away his test and gave him a zero because the teacher thought that he was cheating and giving answers to his deskmate. After learning this, I started to help him practice whispering so that it was hardly audible. We kept testing different volumes and he saw that he didn’t need to say the numbers very loudly. By the end of the game (which turned out to be quite fun!) we were whispering silently - basically just moving our lips but not making any sound. We kept practicing and it looks like even a soundless whisper made the calculations easier for him.

Saturday
It saddens me to even think of how worthless this child once felt. My student, A.J., is now 10 years old and in 5th grade of elementary school. When in traditional school she constantly referred to herself as stupid or dumb.

One day she asked me who Hitler was. When I explained, in what I thought were very carefully chosen words, about the Holocaust and the mass killing of Jews, Catholics, the mentally and physically challenged, amongst many others who did not fit into his idea of perfection, to my horror she said to me, "You mean he would have killed me?"

I asked her what she meant, to which she explained, "Because I'm an idiot and retarded." She went on to tell me how only the mentally challenged children go to resource classes at school, and how some of the children at school refer to them as "retards" and "idiots" as well as many other awful terms.

This is a child who has been given a tremendous amount of support at home, with tutors, and I thought, at school. It is amazing to realize whatever constant reinforcement of her many wonderful qualities she has been given by adults, those few cruel words spoken by her peers are the ones remembered.

A.J. was depressed during the whole school year. The only time she seemed really happy was during vacations. She was always asking how long it was until the next break. This must have seemed like an eternity to a child with no apparent concept of time. This student has always been a hard worker and loved all her teachers.

This not wanting to go to school all stemmed from the behavior of other children. A.J.'s 3rd grade teacher stands out in my mind as a prime example of how this type of behavior could be eradicated. The pupils in her classroom were so accepting of each other's diversities it was a joy to behold. That was this child's only really happy school year to my knowledge.

We must be aware of what is going on in our classrooms and homes, not just on papers and the number of books read, but the tolerance and social interaction of the children as well. We cannot blame children for unacceptable behavior: we as the adults are here to educate them after all.

Tuesday
Most of my students have a problem with their ‘b’s, ‘d’s, ‘p’ and ‘q’ as well as the numbers 5, 3, 4 and 2. I have tried the usual exercises such as writing on the carpet, in sand, and the word ‘bed’. Unfortunately these have not worked for some students, so I had to try something different.

Where letters are of concern, I had heard of an exercise that optometrists use where the client uses their arms and feet to denote which side the stick of the letters go. I do not know the exercise but the idea appealed to me. I used this idea and came up with an exercise where the student has to become the letter ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘p’, or ‘q’. They had to feel as if they were the letter, which is great for the imagination.

For the ‘b’ they had to put their left hand in the air and for the letter ‘d’ they had to put her right hand in the air. Their arms would be the stick and their head would be the circle of the letter. For the ‘p’ and ‘q’ we used their legs, the left for the ‘p’ and the right for the ‘q’. The ‘q’ contained a little sideways flick of the lower half of the leg indication the flick up on the bottom of the ‘q’. The exercise consisted of writing a couple of lines of ‘b’s, ‘d’s ‘p’s and ‘q’s mixed up on the board (eg. b p d p b q d b p d q b d etc.) They would mimic the letters with actions. I added music to it (melodic is a right hemisphere function that is equivalent to the language centre in the left hemisphere.) All combined, this exercise produces much laughter which not only makes the lesson fun, it also aided memory retention and retrieval. This exercise is done daily.

After one week I noticed that reversals had become a rarity.

Wednesday
I was reading with my student who has word/letter fear, i.e. too many words on the page and the print too small. We were reading Dr Seuss which he finds enjoyable, but still has words he doesn't know. On finding a word he didn't know, I suggested that he tried to say the letters to himself which he did and surprised himself with the correct answer. If we come across a word like 'smile' I just remind him of the 'magic e' and he now confidently makes the correct word. I also suggested the student closes his eyes and tries to see the word in his mind. This often works with words like 'said'. If he has a problem with a word, I will quickly tell him the word. We make a game of 'trying to guess the word'.

I made a point of telling him any difficult words and when he came across them again and he remembered them and was quite pleased with himself. The student made comments like 'cat' has the same letters as 'hat' but different first letters. He continued to compare words with similar blends and took great pride in showing them to me. This chatting and looking for similar words encouraged the student to read more pages than usual as he wanted to find more similar words.

Saturday
A 14-year old pupil of mine told me today about an amazing website for teachers and their pupils. It's called www.think.com and is completely free, apparently. Schools can register with them, and then their teachers can have their own webspace which the pupils can see by using a password given to them by their school. The children can also have their own webspace, with tools to help them put material there.

The first thought that came into my mind when I heard about this was homework instructions. It's so hard for a dyslexic child to copy down homework details written hurriedly by a teacher on the board in the last minute of the lesson. Children often arrive home with only part of the homework copied accurately, and, even if they want to help, parents are stuck. The child cannot complete the work and is terrified of being in trouble in school the next day.

This new system - or similar versions - could so easily be used by teachers to put the homework for their classes on a webpage instead. Then pupils could look it up at home, and parents would know exactly what was required!

Monday
I purchased a spell checker for one of my students this past week. He seems to enjoy using it for fun and finding words. When he is writing essays or stories he becomes discouraged with the amount of time it takes to type in the words. He ends up just mis-spelling the words in order to keep up with the class or even ahead of the class. He stresses easily and then loses interest with the spell check.

We have discovered that learning ending sounds and beginning sounds has drastically improved my student's spelling level. The sounds are making sense and helping him spell correctly. We did not realize that this would give us a bonus in spelling plus improve his reading! We are still having trouble learning the long vowel sounds in words. The concept seems overwhelming to him, but we will continue to work in that area until we are successful!

Dot's Diary continues