It's been a long while...

Wow, last posted two years ago. At that time, Zach had just gotten his Irlen glasses. For some reason, his eyesight has "improved" with the Irlen lenses. He has not had to change his lenses because his "degree" has stabilised... He has been with DAS for about 6 terms now - the improvement is nothing to shout about... but it's better than no support I suppose.

Stacey is on her third pair of Irlens now... she's had to change her lenses twice as she grows and needs new colours. In her P6 year now, she now has new accomodations of larger exam papers (printed on A3 sheets instead of A4) with the corresponding enlarged print, as well as the usual extended time which she always had.

I've stopped teaching Melody - she has since started with DAS - and while her mom says she wishes the progress could be faster (understandable since she was having individual lessons with me, while it's only group lessons in DAS), she is still pleased that Melody is coping reasonably well in school.

In the last few months, I have taken up a new student for OG - little Cloud. She is a K2 student right now, preparing to go to Primary 1 next year. I started lessons with her in March, so tomorrow will be 4 months so far. Tomorrow we will have had 25 lessons in those 4 months since she sees me twice weekly. It should have been more but there were interruptions due to holidays and such. Still, I am pleased with how far she has come. A totally reluctant not-quite-reader, she was somewhat anxious and lacking in self-confidence... today she has blossomed and become a much more confident reader. We are making our way to the magic-e words tomorrow and she has already learnt how to read Rabbit words. Her letter formation has improved by leaps and bounds and she hardly makes mistakes now with writing her letters, although she still gets a little confused by where on the lines some letters sit or stand.

I have also taken on another student, Kay, a P5 boy with Asperger's Syndrome. I don't give him OG lessons though... I tutor him in Maths and hope to prepare him for the PSLE next year. I'm open to taking on children with mild ASD as I have come to learn a great deal about ASD and SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder) since my own chlidren have them.

Life has become more and more packed as I take on more kids... Zach is now much more mature and already in Sec 1. He travels independently and settles down to his work on his own. He helps me around the house as well, and doesn't need me to "chauffeur" him around anymore. :) With Stacey in Sec 1 next year as well, I expect only to be running around after the little one now... and so hope to have more time to teach. And maybe I will have more time to update this blog as well.

Melody - Informal Assessment and Lesson 1

Spent some time going through the informal Assessment with Melody recently.

She's an almost 7yo child, going into the Primary School system next year. I've known MummyB since the time Melody was born, and since Shannon is the same age as Melody, it was always easy to do a running comparison between the two, even though Shannon is a whole 10 months younger than her.

I'd always noticed, once Melody started learning her letters and sounds, that she was rather slow in it. I did make a few suggestions once in a while that perhaps MummyB might want to monitor her a little more closely since she seemed a little slow to pick up the reading... and it was only finally this year when MummyB officially asked me if I could do something for Melody. When I said I would earlier this year, the cost of the sessions put them off because both MommyB and her hubby didn't earn that much and it would be a struggle to pay for twice a week lessons, even at the reduced rate I was offering them. So they waited longer... and because it seemed that Melody was finally making a little bit of improvement, they said that they would wait and see some more.

Finally, a few weeks ago, MummyB asked me again to come and do an informal assessment for her Melody. They were very concerned since she was obviously not ready for Primary One. So I did. Given that Melody was less than a month away from turning 7, I prepared both the lower level Informal Assessment and the "normal" one (meant for school-going children) for the session... but it turned out that I didn't need it.

Melody's issues involved even telling left from right, and even getting the alphabet right. She knew most of her lower case letters, but seemed confused as to which were lower case and which were upper case. She could not produce the alphabet in its entirety from A-Z.

I had a page of CVC words that were quite simple for her to work on. They all contained only short vowel sounds, and nothing "tricky" like "th" or "sh" or anything like that. She could only read a handful, and tried to sound out the rest with little success.

According to her mom, she had been attending some phonics lessons for over a year when she was younger, but they stopped it more than a year ago when it became apparent that she was not improving. She had also seemed to pick up very dodgy vocalisations of the sounds - they all had an additional "er" attached to them... so /t/ ended up as /ter/ instead of the just the unvoiced consonant. And this so totally messes up their ability to blend. This is what makes the work so frustrating too... that I know have to un-teach an already struggling child the poor teaching that she has had, in order to get her to learn it right! Ugh!

Anyway... we also tried some spelling and with the few exceptions that she had had drilled in her already, her attempts were very shaky and often didn't pan out.

So in her first lesson, I first had to tackle her left and right issues, which I did by getting her to pick up an imaginary pencil each time. I also got her to practice different hand actions to associate the movements better with left/right.

Then I also had to deal with handwriting as well as the many reversals that she had... so we are moving quite slowly. We only managed "a", "t" and "b" in that first lesson... and even then, she was a little resistent to the learning of the cards... interestingly, she loved writing... something Stacey always hated.

I'm going to see how much of Lesson 1 she retained before really deciding on what kind of a pace I need to move at. On the one hand, she is far far behind her classmates... on the other hand, her school is the type that begins its school year with the P1 starting from the very basics of phonics and basically assuming that everyone has not been overtaught in Kindergarten. So that will be good for her in the sense that she will have more reinforcement in school... but it depends on how far ahead her classmates are. MummyB did say though that they did some testing in order to stream the children, so that will be helpful for Melody for the time being.

Pathetic at blogging

Sigh... I am so pathetic.

This blog keeps on going into comas... haha.

Well, this is yet another effort to restart it. Mostly because I have somehow gotten myself a new student. I just couldn't bear to say no. Even though I don't really have the time with Zach having so many more therapies now and all 3 of my own kiddos being in Primary School next year, I couldn't say no to my friend B who's daughter Melody (not her real name) is in need for intervention.

Since Melody is a January "baby", I have recommended that mummy B contacts the Ed Psych to get an assessment soon.

So yes, I'm back on track, and hoping that taking the time to prepare Melody's lessons will get me going getting Stacey back on track... and even Zach, if we can fit it in between all his other interventions.

Stopped for the "time being"...

Received an SMS from Donny's mother today... saying that the children (my two godchildren, Donny and his sister Elvy) had been sick and was on medication and it made them drowsy, so she asked to stop lessons "for the time being"....

And I just can't help but feel that she just doesn't realise how important it is for Donny to catch up. He's already in K2, and there is still so much where he is lagging far far behind in... his reading skills are sadly lacking, and he will definitely have trouble coping with being in P1 next year.

So fine, it's just as well I suppose. My own Stacey has ballet exams coming up, and she's got extra coaching classes on Sundays from next week until mid-march... so I'll stop lessons then, for the time being, and if she cancels yet another class when the ballet exams are over, I think I shall just give up.

If his mother cannot be bothered to make his lessons a priority (and these are lessons for which others would have to fork out about $600+ a month), then there's really nothing I can say. As it is, I am only seeing him once a week, which for him, is sadly insufficient because he is lagging so far behind... and she can't even commit to that one hour a week. As the godmother, there is little I can do or say other than to pray for the child, and pray that he doesn't become one of those demoralised children who struggle so much with school that in the end, they seek out bad company and find themselves in trouble both in and out of school. Sigh.

Lesson cancelled... again.

Argggghhh!

Today, the godson's mother sms'd me to ask if today's lesson could be cancelled because his friend's mother had called, and the boy wanted to attend his friend's birthday party. I'm sure she would have asked his opinion (and which 5yo would choose to have a lesson over attending a birthday party?!?) before sms-ing me.

So that means, in this last many weeks, he's still only had 2 lessons with me. At this rate, I think I won't bother continuing... she obviously doesn't think the lessons are a great priority, and I'm just wasting my time. Grrrrrrrrrr!

Starting with the Godson

The Godson, Donny (not his real name), is now 5+, going on 6 at the end of the year. He is currently in his 2nd year of Kindergarten.

He comes from a not so well-to-do background... parents are not superbly educated, and find managing their finances a great challenge. As a result, his education has been of a sub-standard level. From the time he was little, he was looked after by a nanny - an elderly lady who is not very educated and speaks only Chinese. He only started attending Childcare a while back, and even then his learning can be described as slow at best.

His teachers complain that the child writes badly - that is, his handwriting is atrocious and very untidy. His letter formation is also weak. He is falling behind in terms of reading and spelling... a situation made worse by the lack of intelligent conversation (as opposed to very functional interaction between caregiver and child, mostly consisting of instructions and scolding) outside of school.

So when I learnt about his situation, I volunteered to go to his house once a week, seeing as to how his home is near my in-law's place... and I've since had 2 lessons with him... the pace is slow. The child is unused to speaking good English, and so, the sounds are so unfamiliar. It takes a great deal of effort to curl his tongue around the sounds and produce a halfway decent sound.

An initial informal assessment shows a child who is unable to blend, and does not seem to have any notion of blending, despite having been in Kindergarten 1 last year. He doesn't know many of the basic sounds of the vowels and consonants. The words that he read successfully, he recognised by sight, not the results of phonemic awareness. He cannot consistently differentiate between a capital letter and a small letter (or uppercase and lowercase letter). His letter formation is awkward, and has to be re-taught.

So in the first lesson, we started on just the first 4 sounds in the OG scope and sequence, developed by Ron Y... and did another 4 in the second lesson. I also incorporated handwriting, as well as some blending and reading using the cards. To motivate and encourage practice, I got him to make his own set of sound cards... he possesses 8 so far. He picked up the keywords readily enough, although he struggled with "wagon", not having seen one in Singapore. But it's a start.

He also picked up the notion of the "headline", "belt-line" and "foot-line" readily enough, although it looked like he might have learnt some of it in school. So we plod along. Progress is slow, in part due to the only-once-a-week lessons, in part due to the fact that there is little home support.