Update on Melody

I have had about 36 lessons with her in total already, and have already brought her up to doing Rabbit words in syllabication, teaching her the 1-1-1 rule using the "ing" suffix, besides the floss rule as well. In terms of phonograms, we have finally completed the basic level, bringing her up to "tch".

We had to stop for the whole month of June because after I came back from church camp, one of the kids came down with chicken pox, and because Melody has an infant sister, I didn't want to risk spreading chicken pox to their family. In the end, it was all in vain because I gave Melody all of one lesson before she ended up getting chicken pox anyway (not from me though) and we had to stop lessons again for another two weeks.

A big development was that she was officially diagnosed as Dyslexic with DAS. She also has Language Processing Disorder, for which she will have to see a Speech Therapist as well. So I will continue to give her lessons until she joins DAS officially. Mother B had initially asked whether I would continue to teach her, but I advised her to allow Melody to go for classes with DAS as it would do her good to come into contact with other children who also have dyslexia... and perhaps she might be more encouraged if she saw that others are struggling as she is, but also trying despite it... and the group situation might give her enough push to keep her going when the going gets tough, since she has a propensity to start whining and bargaining when confronted with yet another new rule or sound that she has to learn. I hope to finish teaching her the "magic-e" sounds before we stop lessons... and if we can take her to the reptile words in syllabication, that would be awesome, but we really have to see how fast she can go given the 6-week break she has had (with the exception of the one lesson in between).

Update on Stacey

Stacey's Psych report finally came out at the end of July... the EP had just had a baby, and we had just returned from a H1N1 affected country, so we postponed the meeting till end of July.

Happily, the EP recommended an exemption for Chinese... much to Stacey's and my relief... sadly, the Special Needs Officer in her school has gone on long leave, and there is apparently no replacement for the time being, so I actually had to email the school's General Office to enquire about the status of the SNO's absence, and how that would affect Stacey's application for her exemption of Chinese. Thankfully, they were able to send in the application anyway, and we are now just waiting for the official approval from MOE for her to finally drop Chinese as a school subject.

The reason I am eager to have her drop Chinese is because the school is looking to bring up their results in Chinese, and they are piling on the homework and raising the bars... unfortunately for Stacey, this leaves her drowning in the process. Homework time is made so much more frustrating because there is so much homework, and she is unable to do it... and it frustrates me even more that we are spending so much time doing homework for a subject that she will eventually drop. So we look forward to the day when we can officially say byebye to the subject.

We have reinstated OG lessons to their rightful place - taking priority over homework and all other things, on the days that it is assigned. Still, it being done at home, it still gets pushed out of the way here and there... but we are back at it with much greater regularity now.

I'm also trying to work more now on fluency and automaticity... the EP revealed that Stacey seems to have trouble truly blending sounds... she tends to rely more on visuals than on blending, trying to "see" the word in her head before "sounding" out the word she is given. So we have been told to step it up on the visual memory side of things, as well as to train her to have a keener sense of visual differences - esp in letter positions. It was suggested that we use "spot the differences" games to train her to pick up on visual differences.

So I'm trying to do that more, besides playing more games that help her to distinguish between words that sound the same but are spelt different... a challenge because she's gotten to the stage where she has quite a few different ways to spell the various long vowel sounds.

I've also taken to spurring her on by giving her a reward system - to encourage her to try her best during class and to work towards her goal - receiving "cute paper" (something that is the rage now in her school apparently) when she finally accumulates enough stamps on her reward sheet. :)

Dead blog... but going to be revived...

Firstly, I must apologise, because this blog has effectively been dead for the last almost 4 months. Sorry about that.

I will now update in several nutshells about the various kids I have.

Kasser:
Kasser has stopped lessons for the time being. The economy has hit his family hard, but his dad is one of those who must pay for lessons and hesitate to accept when I offer to teach for free (until Kasser's mom finds a job). So I have not seen Kasser since the school holidays began, and I will not be seeing him for the next 2 weeks since I will be away, then on self-quarantine together with my children.

Zach and Stacey:
Lessons have been very haphazard in terms of frequency... homework got in the way most of the time, as well as a lack of discipline on my part. I have to do something about that. Next week, after we return, I am determined to set them back on track with OG.

Stacey's Psych Report:
We finally have exemption for Chinese more or less in the bag! Stacey went for a follow up session with the EP over the June Holidays, and the EP said that she would be giving her the diagnosis as well as asking for exemption for Chinese, and longer time during exams. So now, I'm waiting for the report to come out (we will only receive it after we return from our trip and after our LOA - cos the EP has a new baby and we don't want to bring any germs over...). This is a huge relief because Stacey's homework woes this semester has also been in part due to the Chinese teacher's habit of giving homework in chunks... 5-7 pages of work and writing, plus extra writing practice... and we are talking 2-3 pages worth. All due the next day. So not funny. And the task of writing is particularly difficult for Stacey, so she usually ends up in a meltdown on Chinese homework days. In fact, I took to not helping her and just asking her to treat her homework like the exams - so that her teacher would have a better idea of what she knew and did not know... otherwise, I would just end up giving her the answers and that made homework meaningless.

Exam Results:
This year, Stacey didn't have any special accomodations arranged like she did for last year in P1 (because she had a very enlightened teacher who provided her with good support. Unfortunately, we lost that teacher this year - she taught the P1s again) so she bombed her Spelling and (unseen) Dictation and brought home a score of only 66 (1/15 for S&D) when she could have scored 75 had she scored full marks for just the spelling section. Ah well. Still, she managed a 83 for Maths, which was wonderful, and of course, a fail for Chinese, which was expected.

Zach did reasonably well too - 74 for English, 70+ (can't remember now) for Maths... I think it was close to 80... then 66 for Science (where he got completely tripped up by the language and the fact that the answers had to be super precise). Without Chinese, his average score jumped up dramatically and he found himself ranked somewhere in the middle of his class, as opposed to the bottom 5 where he usually found himself in the previous years due to Chinese pulling his marks right down. So we're pleased with his work too.

The Uninitiated - Zachary

Zachary is my eldest. At 8+, he is in Primary 3 this year. I never dreamed he'd be diagnosed as Dyslexic.

Zach zoomed through his Phonics program, which he completed in just 10 months. He was in K2 when he began with the teacher who taught Montesorri Phonics from her home, and he blazed through the word lists that she gave for practice.

Even as he went through Kindergarten, he had very little (noticeable) problems with his worksheets when it came to English. Maths was significantly more of a struggle, while Chinese was non-existent (his command of it, that is... not the homework. Homework he had plenty of...)

So as he entered into Primary School, his struggles with all things arbitrary and his weakness in Mathematical concepts became more obvious. He struggled with simple concepts that came naturally to me growing up. His younger sister would often blurt out answers way ahead of him, and this despite the fact that she was one whole academic year behind.

Chinese was a mystery to him... he couldn't, even at P2, string a sentence together... he had so little vocab that his youngest sister way surpassed him in terms of vocabulary and understanding Chinese.

So even as I was sharing with the Educational Psychologist about his difficulties (when I was seeing her for Stacey's problems), she noted that it was a very unusual thing for a child to not pick up at least a little Chinese... despite having been in school since he was 3 and learning the language from 20mths old, when he attended childcare.

End of last year, he went to see the Educational Psychologist, because I was getting increasingly frustrated at his inability to communicate information clearly, and his apparent inability to remember what teachers had said in school. Compounded by the fact that they had a nightmare of a teacher in P2, his struggles became glaringly obvious. I thought he was only Dyscalculic. Or that maybe he had Chinese Dyslexia.

But it turns out that he is dyslexic. He also has a great visual memory. Which is how he had been coping all this while. He had not been decoding words or blending them. He had memorised how they were spelt. And he used his memory for the words that he could read. So he struggled this year when he was faced with Science and its unique set of vocabulary, never before encountered.

He also has other issues, like a poor verbal memory - he literally is unable to remember what has been said to him, and retains only about half what other people are able to retain. Given the passing of time, he only retains about a third.

All this explained why he had always been the hands-on kid I knew him to be. He also has some social issues it seems... being too literal in his interpretation of things, he is unable to fit in perfectly. He used to get teased or "bullied" by "friends" - they would tell him tall stories and laugh at him because he believed them... he always fell for their stories hook, line and sinker.

So it has been recommended that we begin OG lessons. My 4th student. One I never imagined would need OG.

And honestly, I don't really know where to begin. Getting him to blend and sound out words instead of just relying on his memory will be, in itself, a challenge. Maybe we just have to use more non-words instead to force him to sound out instead of drawing from his memory bank. I really need to sit down and figure out this one.

How it all began...

This blog will chronicle my newly hatched journey in the Orton-Gillingham method of teaching Dyslexic children...

When Stacey, my middle child, was in Kindergarten, I wondered why she was struggling so. She seemed bright enough... able to out-talk and sometimes out-wit those older than her, yet, she couldn't seem to get her hands (or tongue, or mind) around sounds. I sent her for Phonics lesson with her ex-kindergarten teacher who specialised in teaching Montesorri style phonics from home. My son, Zach, had gone to her and was doing well, so I started her too when she was in her first year of Kindergarten. At that time, she was only 4, for she is a Nov baby, and while her peers in her class were already 5 or reaching their 5th birthday soon, she was, in reality, only 4y1m when she started life in K1.

Zach seemed to zoom through his Phonics... he read the lists easily enough... and seemed to learn the sounds easily enough, and he didn't seem to have problems reading. He could even read long complicated words that he encountered in his books and worksheets and school life. No big deal. Sure, occasionally he got words wrong and read them weird, but after a quick correction, he was usually spot on after that.

Stacey, on the other hand, struggled. She struggled to rhyme. She struggled to sound letters. She struggled with vowels. Whatever she didn't know, she guessed. Sometimes she was right on target. Many times she was outrageously wrong. She relied on the pictures in her books to give her clues as to what the words might say. And because half the time she got it right, the other half of the time, those who taught her felt that she was playing the fool... that she was not concentrating, that she was not trying hard enough. Her writing was wonky... often she reversed letters... b d p q... even the s in her name got turned around. She would reverse her numbers too... often confusing 2 with 5, and writing 3 so that it faced the other way. My teacher-trained mind shouted out that something had to be wrong... yet when I brought up the suggestion that perhaps she needed special support, her educators felt that I was making a mountain out of a molehill... that she couldn't be a special needs child... she was too bright to be one... she was not slow. No, she was just lazy or not taking her work seriously.

In 2007, when Zach started Primary School, I quit my job as a full-time teacher to stay home with my kids. This led to much more time with the children, and I saw how hard Stacey struggled with her reading... sometime in June, a friend who was also my children's godmother, suggested that perhaps Stacey might be dyslexic... her own son had been described as one by a friend... and had put him through an informal OG assessment which had surfaced his problems. FF, the children's godma, went through a course to be trained as an OG teacher... and offered to take a look at Stacey after her training.

So started our encounter with OG. Stacey began weekly sessions with FF, who felt that she needed the support. I stopped Stacey's lessons with the Montesorri Phonics teacher - those lessons were putting her under tremendous pressure and stress... it was not doing her any good. Under FF's kind encouragement and a method of learning that suited Stacey's learning style and needs, Stacey flourished. In no time, Stace went from a child who studiously avoided books and who declared that "I cannot read, only korkor can!" to a happier and more confident child who said "Mummy, I will read to meimei (younger sister)...". For half a year, Stace attended weekly sessions with FF, and she began to deal better with worksheets and work... learning to use her sounds and blend more systematically. Her writing and awareness of letter formation improved, and her reversals lessened.

Encouraged by her progress, and realising that her lessons with FF couldn't extend beyond that year (for she would soon go on to Primary School and only come home at around 2pm - a time when FF started her private piano classes at her home), I quickly made the decision to join the OG Associate Program offered by the Orton-Gillingham Centre, taught by Ron Yoshimoto. It didn't come cheap... but it was well worth the investment.

In Dec 2007, I attended the 2 week full-time course, and came away enlightened and raring to go. I picked up where FF left off with Stacey (who by this time had had about 16 or so lessons with FF) and tried to continue. However, I decided also to have Stacey seen by an Educational Psychologist, to see if she could be assessed and possibly obtain an exemption from Chinese Mandarin Testing in school, seeing as to how she was truly struggling with Mandarin at that time.

Thus, in order for her dyslexia not to be masked by her OG training, I stopped her lessons for 2+ months, until she had her assessment in March. Unfortunately, it was no soon enough. It was revealed that Stacey had a high average non-verbal IQ, but anything that had to do with language was brought down to just within the Average range... but the Average scores were not good enough to have her formally diagnosed as having Dyslexia... despite the Psychologist feeling that she does present as being dyslexic... so we wait. Meanwhile, we continue with her lessons... the first year has been somewhat rocky and inconsistent - in part due to our having moved out of the house for almost 4 months then the move back in, in part due to my just settling into the role of a Stay-Home mom.

So right now, Stacey is still not very far from where she left off in terms of Scope and Sequence with FF, having progressed only by a few sounds and into Rabbit words (under Syllabication), but she has made great leaps and bounds in terms of coping with spelling thanks to techniques like finger-spelling and sky-writing.

This year, I intend to make her OG lessons with me a priority, and try to have lessons with her twice a week. Something else may have to give... I have not decided what... but we definitely need more time for her to work on OG.