Sunday, March 15, 2009

Proud moments...

Zach came home a while back with a top score in his Topical Test 1 Composition Writing, scoring an impressive 15/20, being one of 2 top scorers in his class (the other top scorer is also the other dyslexic in the class).

This round, with the CA1s just over, he also came home with another top score, this time in his English CA Paper... an impressive 36/40... which translates to 90%! Good on him. Again, this is the top score in his mixed-ability class. He lost 3 marks in Comprehension, which is something that is expected, and he didn't know "canoeing" and "trekking", and so missed one MCQ. But overall, very good!!!

Stacey also came home with an impressive 48/50 for her latest Maths CA1!!! This was apparently also the highest in class, she said.

So I'm very proud of the two of them... they have worked really hard and done well. Good job! And all this without any accomodations to their dyslexia!

Stacey & Zach on Spelling Rules

I've been trying to integrate more games into OG lessons... on Saturday, we did the session entirely in games, moving away from the standard OG lesson for that day. We used spelling cards and I got them to verbalise the rules whenever they made a mistake. We used sorting cards for the "tch vs. ch", "dge vs. ge" and "ck vs k" words, explaining over and over again when to use what.

Zach was a challenge because he would keep relying on his visual memory to tell himself which words were correct instead of using the rules to sort out the words.

Zach is constantly a challenge because he has such a good visual memory bank... there are so many words that he already knows, so I'm constantly trying to find words that he doesn't know so he can rely on sounding them instead of on his pre-knowledge of the spelling. argh!

Lesson 16 tomorrow...

Am seeing Kasser tomorrow for his 16th lesson. Time flies. It will be exactly 2 whole months since I started working on him, and I'm quite pleased with his progress so far...

We've moved up to the "-ed" phonogram, and tomorrow we will be embarking on the "magic-e". This in itself will be a challenge. So far, he has a tendency to try to split sounds like "-nk", "-ng" and even stuff like "tch", "ck", "wh" into their individual letters, until you remind him once more. Once he is reminded, he's fine.

Maybe I'm trying to push him too far too fast, but then again, he is already in P2, and needs to be bumped up.

I'm also trying to come up with more creative ways of getting him to revise his learned words. Without constant exposure, he does not remember them after a while, although this is to be expected.

I also hope to expose him to more passages. So far, with all the bumping up, we are still not getting in much exposure to passages and comprehension. I want to integrate more vocabulary and comprehension into lessons, but that will slow us down. He is still having regular English tuition, cos the parents seem to feel that OG will not be sufficient... but I'm worried that the English tutor will undo whatever he is taught in OG, including the building up of confidence and self-esteem. Ah well.

Hopefully, he will remember to go to bed early tonight, and be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed tomorrow for class. He was tired again the last lesson, and was literally falling asleep at the desk when asked to read. He was also showing reversals in reading when tired, as well as sounding wrongly in the oddest fashion... sigh.

Apologies...

Been neglecting this blog. Sorry. Updating now...