In this borrowed post from Susan Barton’s website, a mother tells of her experiences in school as an undiagnosed dyslexic student. Watching her son repeat her path broke her heart, as she tells in the letter. It does not have to be that way! Recognizing that your child has signs of dyslexia and getting him or her the help needed will literally change their life. It is the best educational gift a parent of a dyslexic child can give. Susan Barton video
Tag: teaching
Letter from a student
Every once in a while a student will surprise me with a letter tucked among the assignments they turn in. I had just such a surprise today. Marie wrote me a letter in her journal. It is the kind of letter that makes all the long hours and brain racking to think of yet another way to present a concept again worthwhile. I share the text of the with you here
Dear Mrs. Hall,
Thank you for being a great teacher for me. You helped me so much with my reading and spelling. You have inspired me to keep on going until I got it. You helped me improve with everything.
Your friend,
Marie
I can only humbly say, “Thank you, Marie. You and your fellow students inpsire me every day too. We are a good team that way.”
Bit of wisdom
“Children are living messages that we send to a time that we will never see.”
Author Unknown, but he or she was clearly a wise person!
Teaching them to spell what they hear
My second grade small group is in nonsense word mode. I dictate nonsense words strung together for them to write as sentences, we do games with nonsense words, we write nonsense words in columns by vowel sound, we make up meanings for the nonsense words and sentences, and giggle when we think it sounds as if we are speaking Dutch or Russian.
The students are enjoying the nonsense words, unaware of the serious work they are accomplishing. I am building their ability to latch onto the sounds they hear and remember the units of sounds in the order given to spell it out. They have grown accurate in their ability to read and spell crazy, made up words like bliv, nuv and zosk. As they sound out and finger spell these words, they firm up their ability to read and spell real words by syllable, even if they have never before seen that word.
The sense of using nonsense words is that it forces the student to work with words he or she has not memorized. This causes them to rely on the key tools I teach them to sound out and finger spell real words. It makes them stretch their short term memory for sounds, and helps them quickly land on the vowel sound – even when it is hopelessly mixed in with oddly combined consonant sounds.
I am challenged to help my students develop the skills they need to read and spell while also building up their confidence in their own abilities. I love how Dorothy Blosser Whitehead phrases my goal. “Our goal is a mastery of print. When students don’t have to be told the words, it gives them a sense of power.” Bring on the nonsense words, we are empowering students in this classroom!
How fast or slow?
How long?
“How long will this take?” is one of the first questions parents ask me when we meet to discuss starting their child in a course of study to improve the child’s literacy skills. My honest answer is always the same, I can’t promise a timeline.
A lot of factors go into the speed with which a child’s reading and spelling skills improve. The child’s age when lessons begin is a big one, with the level of confusion the child has about language following a close second. It is completely worth the time it takes to build a firm foundation for literacy, even if little outward progress can be seen while the structure is laid.
Ariel’s story
Ariel was seven years old when she enrolled in our dyslexia center. As with all new students, I evaluated where she was in order to plan lessons and chart progress. A child’s knowledge of the alphabet is important, because letters are the tools we use to code and decode our language. One of the first things I ask students to do is write me an alphabet and tell it to me as they point to each letter.
Ariel loves the white board, and showed me her artistic use of it as she wrote for me her version of the alphabet. Starting strong, she wrote the letters A – F, in a mixture of capital and lower case letters. Following that was a series of little pictures – smiley faces, stars, hearts and birds. She turned proudly and gestured toward her work, telling me these were her ABC’s. Curious, I asked her to read them to me. She confidently read A – F, pointing to each letter as she called it out. Without missing a beat, she moved right to the pictures, repeating A – F as she pointed to her drawings. Having a few pictures left over, she poked at each one and called them each Z. Beaming with pride in her accomplishment, she favored me with a little twirl and curtsey as her performance ended. The beginning point for her lessons was clear.
We started with learning letters and the sounds associated with those letters, dividing them into vowels and consonants. We traced letters on fuzzy boards, on sandpaper, in tubs of sand and mounds of shaving cream. We created flashcards with letters and a picture to represent the sound each letter made. Ariel’s mom faithfully practiced with her daughter each and every night. By Christmas, Ariel could write a correct alphabet and she could name the letters and sounds in order or if they were mixed up. She had mastered the basic tools for reading and spelling – letters.
Pacing makes all the difference
This is where the philosophy behind Orton-Gillingham can collide with common school practices. “Go as fast as you can, but as slow as you must,“ is a mantra taught to me by my first trainer, Angie Wilkins, as a guide for how to pace tutoring lessons. It was purposefully vague, because each student learns at a different pace, and each student is to be our guide in how fast or slow they need to go. This does not fit into how schools operate, and is a lot of the reason dyslexic students who get no extra intervention flounder, getting further and further behind each year.
When a child moves forward without understanding previous lessons, the dyslexic child is trying to build an understanding of reading and spelling on a foundation of Swiss cheese – filled with holes in their knowledge base. Without help to firm up the foundational knowledge by filling the blank areas with firmly grasped concepts, the dyslexic child is highly likely to fail.
Ariel’s success
Ariel continued to need to move at a snail’s pace that first spring as we moved onto reading simple words and to training her ear to hear the individual sounds of language. It was a joy to weave the lessons into games, songs and rhymes because she took pure delight in knowing she was “getting it.”
It has been nearly three years since Ariel and I began our journey of learning together. Her family support has been unparalleled, her attitude sunny, and her progress astounding. Watching her gains this third year has been like seeing a rose bud unfold into full bloom, but it took the two previous years of achingly slow progress to build the root system and nurture the tender leaves of her language knowledge to get to the point of full bloom. Without the gift of that time, I feel certain she would have withered and collapsed under the weight of uncertainly and discouragement. What a pleasure it is to be a gardener in the lives of these treasured children, taking the time they need to flourish.
2019 update: I recently interviewed a group of the original 6 students who started with me when our Dyslexia Center began in 2010. Ariel was among those students. She is now a rising high school junior, and has plans to attend college, majoring in education with a proficiency in teaching dyslexic students.
Keep Your Bridges High!
A crazy story about a hiker who walks bravely across a rope bridge high over a crocodile infested river helped second graders remember to, “Keep the bridge connections high,” when they worked on forming cursive letter b in small group today. There is nothing as motivational as the thought of pretend crocodiles nibbling at your toes! I think this imagery is good enough to work when we talk about the difference between cursive a and o too!
Reality of a Ticking Clock
The Heartbreak of “Too Late”
It is a sad reality that sometimes it is too late to help a dyslexic student in the way he needs to be helped because he or she is too old. The chipper quote, “It’s never too late to remediate!” is true in theory but often not in the cold, hard light of practicality. Middle and high school students have a heavy load of reading based homework, and are so burdened to complete assignments that the mental energy required to learn more effective ways to read and spell may be asking too much for a struggling student. Add to that the reality of a brain that has developed past the reading centers, and for some kids, there is such a thing as “too late,” sad as it makes me to say that.
There are exceptional students who will make amazing turn-arounds and improve in reading and spelling despite being past the optimal age for such a change. See my story of Jeremy the Jeep Guy for the story on one of my students who made remarkable improvement as a high school student. But those are the exception rather than the rule.
Optimal age for intervention
Studies show that if a child is not reading on grade level by the time he or she leaves third grade, they are unlikely to ever read on grade level. It is not a great stretch to see that waiting until a child is in 2nd or 3rd grade to begin remediating dyslexia is skating on the edge of “too late.”
I have worked with children as young as 4 years old. There is a lot about language and how words and sounds work that a 4 year old needs to learn to be successful at reading and spelling. Non-dyslexic students naturally take in this knowledge, but a dyslexic child does not without some targeted teaching. Beginning to work with a child at an early age, kindergarten or first grade, helps in several ways.
No Backlog of Unlearned Lessons
A kindergarten aged child is not years behind his or her peers in learning, because that child is at the beginning of the reading journey! Remediation at this age is helping him keep up with what his or her classmates are learning. The learning is reinforced by what is taught in the classroom during normal school lessons. Now that tutoring has clarified what is being taught, the child is able to benefit from the classroom lessons in a way not possible before.
No Bad Habits
Dyslexic students are a very creative group. They will find work arounds that are not efficient or straightforward, but in some convoluted way do allow them to finish their work. Once these habits are formed, a they create the new challenge of teaching a child to unlearn his bad habits and replace them with new, better habits. It is clearly much easier to teach the good habit in the first place!
No Baggage of Past Failures
When a dyslexic child reaches about second grade, he looks around at his classmates, and realizes that everyone else in the room is able to understand what the letters on the page mean, and he cannot. She begins to notice that everyone else can spell the words correctly after a bit of practice and she cannot. That is the truly heartbreaking moment when that dyslexic child begins to feel badly about herself, and does not want to try as hard because it does not appear to matter.
Act Sooner Rather Than Later!
If a reading difference is suspected, don’t wait to investigate! Children as young as four can be screened for tendency toward dyslexia. Start tutoring and interventions then, and the child will not have to fall into the sad category of “too late.” Don’t be one of the heart broken parents who tell me they would give anything to have started getting help for their child sooner. You can’t have the years back.
That is why we write in pencil!
In my classroom erasers are the hot commodity. I have been known to sweep the tabletop with a broom to clear the eraser dust between small groups. We have a mini dustpan and whisk broom dedicated to clearing the stuff off our work surfaces. A lot of erasing happens in each and every small group.
Eraser dust has a story to tell. Although I am not thrilled with the mess, I am happy to see my students trying to write good sentences, trying to spell words correctly, trying to form those cursive letters. Eraser dust tells the stories of attempts made, of mistakes corrected, and lessons learned in how to do it better.
Learning from one’s mistakes is a valuable lesson. I teach my students to try and find their own mistakes before I point them out. We review and edit immediately after writing, while the intended message is still in the student’s mind. All that erasing represents steps along the way to getting it right, to learning to make less mistakes the next time.
The prescriptive element of teaching using the Orton-Gillingham method teaches teachers to analyze student errors. The errors show us what the student actually knows and does not know. Teaching is not finished until the student understands a concept so well that he or she no longer makes mistakes in using it, or recognizes errors and self-corrects.
When I look at the piles of eraser dust on the tabletops, it tells me my students are trying. They are working instead of sitting idle. They are learning from their mistakes, correcting them, and making less mistakes all the time. I can clean up the mess, it represents progress. The ability to erase and correct mistakes is, after all, why we write in pencil!
I wonder why…
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” ~Ellen Parn
I love how curious my dyslexic students are! It is a great characteristic, and will drive them to greatness just by giving them rabbit trails to follow which are personally interesting to them! Bring on the “I wonder why’s!”
This needs a story!
One O’clock Letters
The second grade small group is learning to write in cursive. Most of the letters they have learned so far have been formed in similar ways, so they have not been too difficult for the students to master. We have simple stories that keep the letter formation in the student’s minds. For example, the “1:00 letters” are all formed by starting at the line, following an imaginary clock face around to where 1:00 would be, then realizing they “forgot their lunch,” so retrace their arc back, come underneath to “rejoin the class,” then “end with a smile,” because it is lunch time. This little story helps the students remember which direction their pencil should be heading, and where it is going next. It makes them smile, and covers the letters a, c, d, g, o, and q. I get a lot of mileage out of the one o’clock story!
Friday found the second grade small group struggling to master the cursive letter f. It is not really like other letters, and has some new and different curves. We wrote it using big airplane writing movements. Then using fingertips we traced it on the table and on our wrist. Then it was time to put pencil to paper and write practice rows of the letter. For most of the group practice paid off, and a few lines into the exercise they had the pencil strokes down and were writing legible letter f’s.
This is hard! It needs a story.
A couple of my students seem to struggle with the task of forming letters correctly, whether it is a printed letter they have been forming for years or a brand new cursive one. Eric is one of those students, and he was frustrated with trying to remember the direction his pencil needed to flow to make the letter f. “We need a story to go along with this letter,” he suggested. “A story to help our pencils know where to go.”
Not having a story for f in mind, I suggested we work on one together. This is our story for helping form the letter f.
You are going out to play, and you come out of your room and up the stairs. Your mom calls to you just as you get at the door to outside. “Please go down to the basement for me before you go to play.” So you loop around and go back down the stairs and down to the basement. You get what she needed, then loop back up. Your mom meets you at the top of the basement stairs, you hand her what she sent you to get, and you go outside with a smile.
But what does Mom need you to get?
The story has all the elements needed to guide the students to make a letter f. But I work with an intelligent and curious crew of students, and they were not satisfied with the lack of detail in our story. What Mom wanted from the basement seemed to be the crucial detail lacking in our story. Basements are rare in our part of the country, and none of us have one in our houses. I grew up on a midwestern farm with a basement, so I filled in the story by telling them that when I was their age, my mom would send me to the basement to get carrots that were stored in buckets of sand to keep them fresh through the winter. Adding a bit more detail than I intended to, I recalled once when Mom sent me down to get carrots, and while digging around in the sand for carrots, I accidentally grabbed a toad that was hibernating in the sand. My students giggled as I told them I was sure it made me scream to be holding a toad when I expected a carrot.
That detail made the story come alive for Eric. “Cool!” he said. “Now that is a story that will help my pencil make this hard letter!” He softly murmured to himself as his pencil went past the baseline, “This is where Mrs. Hall grabs a toad, she screams, and runs up the stairs and out the door.”
Amazing, the power of a good story.
Tales from the Dyslexia Center 