This blog keeps dying...

Yes... because my commitment to my own children's OG lessons is so lax. Oh excuses abound... somehow, when it's your own child, and not a "paid" (or even FOC) intervention slot for someone else, it's so easy to push it aside - oh, someone else needs help with schoolwork, which is more urgent... they need to complete their school hw... I am simply feeling lazy... or I simply didn't get down to preparing the next lesson! Argh.

In June, I stepped up the lesson prep for Stacey, since her need for OG is greater than Zach's... and had a 2-wk lesson plan all drawn up... but we never made it past lesson 2. Sad.

Today, I made a new commitment to Stacey to put aside time for OG. On her part, she must eat lunch quickly, and come in for "class" every Monday and Thursday at 2.40pm (she returns home from school at around 2.10pm)... and I, on my part, will keep up with lesson prep as if she were an "outside" student... I need to be accountable... and I need to make her OG lessons a priority. Argh! The same must go for Zach too... even though with him, I'm a little more uncertain because his powerful visual memory makes getting him to blend and learn rules difficult. He doesn't play by the rules. He approaches syllabication and reading in a topsy-turvy manner... sounding the word based on what he thinks is the correct spelling, rather than breaking it up by the sounds he hears. Then again, he could possibly have CAPD, which means that I will have to rethink my strategies with him. Ah well.

I haven't taught Kasser in almost a year. I've had to go to his home a couple of times, to counsel him and on one occasion to scold him, because he threw a tantrum when I asked to speak on the phone and defied his mom's request to come to the phone. Sigh. But there's been a breakthrough. Recently, I spoke to the Form Teacher on the mother's request, and I told the teacher my suspicions. As with most teachers unfamiliar with Dyslexia, she didn't see him as being LD... merely lazy or not trying. In any case, she was reluctant to do anything until the father agreed to the school referring the child to the counsellor... and that was a big hurdle in itself, because the father has "washed his hands off the children" of late, in exasperation and in an attempt to protect the children from his own temper. So, it was with great joy that I received the news that Kasser's mom successfully spoke to his dad and got him to give the approval to refer Kasser to the school counsellor and AE for Dyslexia. On Sunday, I helped Kasser's mom fill in a dyslexia screening form from the school... and I hope that he will get the help he so desperately needs.

Updates....

It's been forever... Sep was the last entry, and things have moved on.

Kasser, my one and only non-family student, has his lessons on hold for the time being. This is because he has moved on into the morning session at school, having been promoted to Primary 3 this year. As such, his mother is still waiting for his schedules to be more firmed before embarking on finding two afternoons or evenings for me to give him lessons. The biggest problems in finding a suitable time arise from the fact that I do have to take care and help my 3 children in the afternoon when they come home from school, which is when Kasser is now free, and because I have to be home with my kids, Kasser's mom now has to bring Kasser to me instead of my going to his place (since that would mean my 3 children would be left home alone). During the holidays, when my children were home, Kasser came over to my house for several lessons. My OG classroom is now set up, and I have a place for all my resources and materials, as well as a proper setup for lessons with us facing each other on either side of a table. I can also close the door and shut out the noise of having 3 other children in the house. So I am still waiting. Waiting to see how keen they are in finding a good solution to the obstacles that currently stand in our way.

Stacey's and Zach's lessons also took a back seat towards the end of last year as well because we switched on the "preparing for exams" battlemode. They were swamped with homework and just getting all that work done and trying to ensure that they still had time to take a break and be a kid was tough... never mind making time for OG lessons twice a week. Some days, they worked till bedtime (8pm) and didn't have time to play. Sad.

Stacey and Zach did reasonably well in their exams, and I am proud of the tremendous improvements they made. Despite their difficulties, both managed to score within the Band 2 range... with Stacey making an almost 10% jump!

Kasser also had a 5% improvement in his scores, so I was thankful for that too!

This year, Zach will continue having group lessons on Comprehension with the SNO in his school during Chinese once a week. Stacey is supposed to have her OG lessons with her SNO but nothing has been arranged yet. I really must email her. I find that the support in Zach's school seems slightly better than in Stacey's... but it's probably too early to tell just yet. We are having Stacey do OG in school to see if she responds better in the mornings rather than in the evenings when she's already tired from a long day at school. Also, it is guaranteed to be more consistent, so that will probably help her as well.

Finally, a class with Kasser!

Finally had a class with Kasser again last Friday. Brought the big kids along to his house again because they were having a holiday due to the PSLE Listening Comprehension. So my two biggies did their homework during the one hour I had with Kasser.

The OG portion of our lessons have been shortened, due to his lack of a regular English tutor now, and my discovery that he has absolutely no grammar understanding to speak of. And because his English Exams are coming up, I have to help him brush up a little so that he can make fewer mistakes with simple Subject-Verb Agreement, and do better overall, in Comprehension, Composition and the likes.

So we covered the "igh" sound again, and did Auditory Drill, Visual Drill, Reading with training for Fluency and some spelling. I also did a little on homonyms - using the "i-e" and the "igh" sounds... trying to put into context the words that he didn't know... which was most of them.

Then we moved on to SVA. Despite it being quite a few lessons now, he still doesn't get it. So I made some cards with irregular verbs for him, showing him simple present tense, simple past tense, continuous tense as well as singular and plural forms... He will have to practise sorting them at home with mom, as well as do the exercises that I had crafted for him... handwritten grammar exercises, specially to meet his needs.

I'm feeling a little discouraged with him these days - it seems that since the lessons became Free of Charge, the commitment level has dipped. Lessons are more irregular - he misses lessons more often, for more frivolous reasons... and the mom is less keen, it seems, to have me come as often as I'd like (which is only twice a week). Ah well. Next year, it will be a challenge, because he will have to have lessons in the evening, when I am busy with my own children. And because he is in the morning school, I cannot keep him too late either. So I will have to figure out how to continue to teach him, or if I should stop. We'll see.

Cancelled Kasser Class

10 minutes before I am due to leave the house for Kasser's class today, the phone rings and I find myself on the line with Kasser's mom. She reports that the child was in school earlier today for hockey and had returned at about 1pm.

At around 3pm, when he was reminded that I was coming over for class, he burst into tears and was whining about how tired he was and how he was not ready for class... so the mom called to ask if I was already on the way, and to ask me if it was OK for class to be cancelled. Sigh.

The boy's tears are just dramatics. They happened in class the other day when I was talking to mom, in his presence, about how to discipline the two children (Kasser and his sister Lindy) and get them to be more independent in studying and in most things... he burst into tears because he felt that she was being unfair, asking them to study for an hour or an hour and a half... to which I retorted that that was severely insufficient, especially since they were so poor in their studies, and needed all the practice they could get. I communicated to the mother, with just facial expressions, to ignore the boy's dramatics as he descended into loud sobbing as we spoke. We continued our conversation, completely ignoring him, and in no time at all, the sobs disappeared and he was back to normal.

So I can only shake my head and sigh that once again, Kasser has won... and lost... because in winning the battle of cancelling OG class, he has lost the opportunity to further improve and solidify his knowledge and skills. And in doing so, he also got one step further into the habit of manipulating his mother into giving in to his nonsense... which means also one step further from being the disciplined child he should be. Sigh.

Further Updates... Kasser first...

We restarted lessons with Kasser. After a two month break (the June holidays saw us not having any lessons at all, and then we were away, followed by a period of self-quarantine due to the H1N1 outbreak and so on... then followed by another postponing of the first lesson due to my falling down and spraining my foot very badly), we finally restarted lessons in August. His mother had not been able to get a job, but I managed to convince them to let me come and give him lessons for free... so happily, I was able to continue where we left off.

As expected, he had forgotten quite a bit of his work... we had to revisit the sounds and the rules... and we had to revisit the concepts of "word", "syllable", "sound" and "letter" and so on...

But as of right now, I'm slowing lessons down a great deal now that he is doing the vowel pairs and he is getting quite confused by the many ways to spell the different long vowel sounds... to add to the problem, he has a very poor vocabulary... so not only does he have to tackle homophones and homonyms (words that sound the same and are spelt different), he has to learn the meanings of those words at the same time. And this has proven to be a very great hurdle for him. Even basic words that I expected him to know, he didn't know... and we are talking about a child who is already in the 2nd half of Primary Two!

I've also started integrating grammar and comprehension out of sheer necessity - and to my horror, he has no concept of singular/plural, subject-verb agreement and tenses... all basic stuff! So there has been a lot of work done with that as well, which also then slows down the progress of the OG lessons... sigh. But now that he no longer has 1-1 tuition for English, I feel like I have to help him in that area as well... because while the OG helps him with spelling and reading specifically, it's in a way useless because the language is, a large part, dead... since he doesn't know so many words... argh! And his sentence structures are so weird... he has no idea when to use present/past/continuous tense... never mind the perfect tense and so on! Oh dear... how am I going to help this boy?!

I only realised the depth of his problems when I had set him some basic grammar work to do... In one sentence, he had chosen a word marked for past tense as the answer, which happened to be correct. But when I asked him why it was the word marked for past tense, and not the one marked for present tense, he explained that the word marked for past tense was used for animals, while the one marked for present tense was used for people... how he got that idea, I will never know!

So lessons are going ahead at a snail's pace... while I was doing one new sound every lesson before the long break, right now, we are only managing one new sound every three lessons or so... with a whole bunch of other more "urgent" lessons weaved in, in an effort to bring up his grades for the coming end of year exams. I just hope that this will be enough.

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.

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.

Backblog - Catch up Posts...

Oops, sorry, I haven't been updating this blog regularly... it's been almost 10 days since the last post. Anyway...

Friday 20th February
Kasser had his lesson again... I think we moved on the the -nk sound (which is essentially 4 sounds really, because it's 'ank', 'ink', 'unk' and 'onk') and also started him on the concepts of "letter", "word", "sound", "syllable", "vowel" & "consonant"... It was quite tough going at first, because he used "letter" and "word" interchangeably... and would also confuse "letter name" and "sound" as well... So we had to go through quite a few times with various words, having him identify the number of words / letters / sounds / syllables / vowels / consonants... I played a game from the 'Go Phonics' set at the end of the lesson and he was thrilled... and at the same time he got in some much needed "th" reading...

Saturday 21st February
Stacey & Zach had their OG lessons during our "campout" at Dance School - I call it a campout because we are at Dance School from 0930 to 1600h on Saturdays... thanks to the various classes and so on.

Zach had his 4th lesson and he did OK, considering he's still very new to OG and I'm going at a blistering pace in order for him to quickly move on to syllabication and affixes. I've also had to tweek the OG lesson a little to fit his needs and to challenge his strong visual memory. He had a habit of going about things backwards... and that was highly frustrating, both for me and him... for example, I gave him the word "lute" to spell. He was supposed to listen to the word, break it up into its sounds /l/, /long u/ and /t/, and use his fingerspelling to keep track of his sounds. But somehow, he already knew in his head that it was spelled l-u-t-e, so he kept on referring to his visual memory, and ended up fingerspelling it /l/, /short u/, /t/ and /short e/! And what made it worse was that after saying those 4 sounds, he could "combine" it back into "lute"! Argh! It's an ongoing process... we are still struggling to settle into the skills of fingerspelling and sounding without relying on visual memory and learned spelling.

Stacey has moved on to Penny words... she's quite happy to have gone on... so now we're moving into spelling of rabbit, reptile and penny words... she's quite pleased with herself and the accomplishment of being able to spell longer words... LOL.

Tuesday 24th February
Only Kasser had his lesson today - so we moved on to -ck words... he's best when he's alert and ready for class... but lessons become so draggy and such a chore when he is tired. Still, the lesson went on fairly well, and we played some spelling games with the cards. We also read from a simple phonics based reader, meant for younger children.

Kasser's mom expressed concern that he is very poor with his comprehension - something that is very common with dyslexics. She was relating how his father would just go at him because he didn't know how to answer the comprehension questions, and didn't seem to get it... and whenever his father would press him to get an answer, he would panic and be even far less able to get the answer right.

It reminds me of a time when we were given a passage written by a dyslexic, completely bad handwriting, bad spelling that took a very very long time to decipher... and we had to do a comprehension based on that "passage". It really opened my eyes to what the dyslexics struggle with on a day to day basis. And I am so tempted to write a passage in gibberish, give it to his father and make him do a comprehension based on that... then he will seriously know what his son is up against on a day to day basis. Now to find myself a dyslexic who writes badly enough... then there is authenticity in the passage. Heh.

Zach and Stacey didn't have their lessons today. So much for top priority. But I'm determined not to let things slide again.... sigh.

Kasser & his Dad

Kasser was so pleased to have been "promoted" to the single line sheet on Tuesday... but I was really pleased to see that he was really making the effort to write neatly and form his letters correctly.

We also moved on to the concept of syllables... I'm trying to bump him up so that we move into bigger words... but he struggled slightly to differentiate between a word, a sound, a letter and a syllable... it's confusing for them at first... but they get it soon enough.

His father woke up towards the end when I was leaving and started again to proclaim that his son was lazy and to put him down. I feel so sad for him. It has come to a point where I cannot say even the slightest thing negative, or the father will pounce on it and denounce the son to be everything negative under the son... Kasser's demeanour changes so much in the presence of his father and the ranting that comes with it. Poor child.

I told the mom to encourage him more... and she said it was the father who would constantly be scolding them and so on... but I think the father also feels in a way that he has to make up for the wife's "mollycoddling" of the children... it's finding a balance for both parents I guess.

He's up to the -ng phonogram already... next lesson we move on to the -nk phonogram... plus I hope to introduce the concept of closed syllables to him... hopefully he understands... if so, we can run with it, and that will greatly build up his confidence.

Kasser is alert...

It is so important for the children to be well-rested to be ready for their OG lesson, and Kasser is the perfect example. The previous week saw a very tired Kasser struggling to blend, spell and learn... this last week, after some intervention from daddy, saw a much more alert Kasser... he'd had more sleep, and he was more ready for class.

The 2nd lesson this week went reasonably well. He was a little more tired than the first lesson, but definitely less so than during last week's lessons, so it was so much better.

I let him play with the spelling cards again, and he enjoyed it very much. This coming week, I hope to take him into reading books and playing games, and building vocabulary. We'll see. So far, we're only into ch... so the next lesson will see us venturing into the Floss rule probably... and I also want to start him on syllabication soon.

It's only been about 8 lessons so far... but I think he's come a long way. But then again, he's in P2... he really needs to move on...

Well Rested...

Kasser had a much better lesson yesterday. He looked fresh and well rested, and as a result, we moved so much faster, and he could even indulge in a game of word building with the cards.

The kids are so funny... they find writing a chore - it is laborious to their dyslexic minds, and an exhausting task too... so when I get them to spell using sound cards instead of writing, they are so much more enthusiastic... and they don't realise that it is exactly the same task - minus the writing! Of course, they get to move around retrieving and putting back the cards, and because I arranged the cards in alphabetical order, he gets to practise sequencing his letters in alphabetical order as well, without even realising it! Heh.

Tomorrow is another day, another lesson. We're on to the "wh" sound already... and I think he will also struggle with it because he is unused to saying "hwh" instead of just "wh"... most Singaporeans don't do it... for example, the word "what" is often pronounced as "wat", instead of "huat"... which is the "correct" way of doing it, and also helps the children to distinguish between the words that begin with "w" and the words that begin with "wh". Heh. Hopefully he'll have a good night's rest tonight, and be ready for class tomorrow.

Still Tired...

Kasser was still tired. When I went for his lesson on Thursday morning, he still looked like he didn't have enough sleep. From what I knew, he went to bed around 10.30pm, and his mother would wake him at around 7.30am in order to be ready for my lesson at 8.30am.

However, despite having his own room, he still insisted on sleeping in the same room as his sister, who that night, wanted to read and so switched on her light... which meant that he couldn't go to sleep, and ended up sleeping late. He apparently doesn't like sleeping alone or in the dark. If he's in his own room, he sleeps with a night light on. All night. Sigh.

How to improve at this rate? When a dyslexic child comes to class tired, his learning is impeded by his tiredness because his tired brain needs to work extra hard to process what we are trying to input into his brain - a task that is difficult even when there is enough rest. But this child is indulged to the point of being spoilt. His parents have extreme parenting styles. One scolds and chides and derides and belittles, the other smothers and pampers and waits on him hand and foot. There needs to be a balance, and both parents need to learn to modify their parenting styles abit. One needs to learn to encourage and build up with words, the other needs to learn to let go and encourage independence - afterall, the child will be 8 soon.

So we moved on to the new phonograms. That day's lesson was particularly hard, because it involved learning two sounds that Singaporean children, brought up with Singlish, are very unfamiliar with... the "th" sound in "thing" and "this"... Many many Singaporean children say "some-ting" and "dis"... they are very unfamiliar with the "th" sounds simply because it is not a sound that is found in any of the mother tongue languages... namely Mandarin, Malay or Tamil. So because the parents are often unable to accurately pronounce this sound themselves, the children grow up not hearing it, and not being made to say their words right... thus, you hear children here saying "someting", "tink! use your brain!", "I have 4 fingers and a tumb" as well as "de bus", "dey are naughty", "dis is my one" and the one that I cannot stand, "mudder, brudder, fudder"... oh gosh!

It was easy to see that he was really really exhausted and giving up by the end of the session. So much so I skipped dictation and stopped, because I knew he could not process very much more. He was guessing wildly, and not stopping to think or sound properly anymore... Sigh.

So perhaps I should not have belaboured the proper pronunciation quite as much... perhaps I should have taught the two sounds in two separate lessons... but I seriously think the child needs to have better discipline instilled in him - and not by shouting or tearing him down, but by encouragement and motivation, as well as consequences that fit his actions (or lack thereof). It's going to be tough bumping him up if he continues like that.

Big Boy...

Although Kasser is already in P2, I'm still using the tri-lined sheets to get him to write better and form his letters properly. He's got weird habits of writing from bottom up, and I'm trying to correct that. Still, since he's already 7+, it's hard to break his habits.... but break-able, they are.

I think I'm keen to break the habit of mis-forming his letters because he still gets confused as to how certain letters are written. So I figure, if he writes everything properly now, it'll become more automatic, and he will be less confused. Even now, he'll stop to ask if a certain letter begins at the head or belt line... and he's never learnt to use the tri-lines in school it seems.

That's a pet peeve I have with the kindergarten system now. They don't place emphasis on handwriting and letter formation, and allow the children to write in just plain boxes... as a result, the children grow up not knowing how to form decent letters, and their words "fly" every which way... a "j" can sit up together with a "t" instead of having its tail swing down below the line and so on. And they then get confused as to the difference between an uppercase letter and a lowercase letter, which then creates problems when they are doing editing for punctuation, because they have no idea which letters are supposed to go below the foot-line, and which letters have to stay on the foot line and so on.

In the last lesson though, I tried the main sound deck with him for the first time, and he did fine. He had only a little trouble remembering the keyword for "w"... but only because he still isn't familiar with "wagon". I'm thinking I might want to change the keyword for "w" and "i" (igloo) because he isn't familiar with those words and they don't serve the purpose of unlocking the sounds for him.

Tomorrow I'll see him again, and I'm moving on... using the main sound deck... hopefully in a few more lessons, his handwriting will have improved and he'll be more confident in forming his letters correctly... and I can move him on to the "big boy" sheets. I also hope to "bump him up" as Ron would often say... seeing as to how he is already in P2. I want to start syllabication soon... and now that he's finished all his short vowel sounds, he can start on closed syllables. But I need him to be a little more stable with his short vowel sounds first...

He was very tired during the last lesson - he said his sister woke him up earlier than he was due to be up... his sister can be quite... how shall I put it?... unthinking... and I think the mother has little control over her in the sense that the mom had already told Lindy (the sister) not to wake Kasser up, yet, she did. So I sent an SMS to their father today, in part to remind that I am going for lesson tomorrow instead of Friday, in part to ask that Lindy be reminded to let Kasser sleep so that he will be well rested for the lesson. The reply that came back? "I take care of that." LOL. I think Lindy will probably leave her brother alone tomorrow morning.

People don't realise that for Dyslexics, it is physically tiring to read and write. And I've seen it in both Zach and Stacey... so Stacey in particular has to be well rested and ready for lessons... and in order for her to do well, she has to experience success. She (and indeed Kasser too) gets discouraged too easily... so I must remember that while I'm trying to bump them up, they also need to work at their own pace....

Finally completed the "baby" sounds

Yay, today Kasser has finally completed the first 26 "baby" sounds... next lesson I hope to move him onto bigger things... so so far, he has 26 sounds and 3 rules under his belt, together with new coping techniques like skywriting, tracing and fingerspelling.

Vowels still present quite a bit of a struggle for him. Today during Auditory Drill, he wrote "e" instead of "i" everytime he heard the short /i/ sound... and I had to check him and ask him to check his sound bank to see if he even had the "e" letter there.

He was quite tired today... tired dyslexics learn far less than well rested ones. He also woke up late and was not ready when I turned up for class today.

Still... I haven't been doing a full OG lesson with him so far... not enough learned words and so on to do dictation... plus I was crashing the sounds... next week I'm going to try him on a full OG lesson plan... complete with learned words and words for spelling for the new phonemes as well. And I also hope to start some reading... we'll see.

Still, not bad for the 4th lesson....

First Paying Student - Kasser

Kasser is an almost 8yo, currently in Primary Two. A church counsellor, who had been visiting the family to provide support and advice and follow-up approached me and asked if I would take a look to see if I could help this young man.

Although his mother is a very conscientious lady, reading to him and trying her best to raise a reader, helping him in schoolwork and basically guiding him closely, he has failed to learn to read fluently and at his level.

From the little that I understood, the family had tried to get him help, asking the school for a referral to an Educational Psychologist, yet, the school was unwilling, saying that Kasser was only slow, not learning disabled. They felt that all he needed was time to catch up with his peers.

On my first visit, I found a young man, very much alert and alive, yet shy and introverted at first. His father was quick to call him lazy, lamenting that he would not try and learn independently, saying that he wouldn't learn rather than couldn't learn.

I spent about an hour with him that morning, doing an informal assessment. I found a young man who, despite phonics instructions from young, still did not know his sounds. He knew only one of the 5 short vowel sounds, and many consonants were also unfamiliar to him. Like Donny, he found some sounds difficult to produce, possibly having learnt them wrong all his life. Writing was also a slight problem... formation of letters were odd, made worse by his left-handedness. When asked to write the alphabet in only uppercase, he got confused... he showed problems with sequencing.

Blending was easy for him if the single consonant was placed in front... but too many single consonants and he got confused. This was especially so if he was unfamiliar with the word. He had no reversals though, so that was a good thing, but he had little idea how to use the "head-line", "belt-line" and "foot-line" to help him in forming his letters. Like Zach and Stacey, his "j" stood up on the footline and extended all the way to the headline, instead of starting from the beltline and extending below the footline.

We've had 3 lessons so far and he is moving nicely along. With skywriting, fingerspelling and tracing under his belt, he is quickly picking up the sounds and keywords. He still struggles with the short vowel sounds a, u and i... and often confuses them when he is in a rush to finish forming the word... but he is better able now to self-correct... a wonderful thing. He's also had the rush of being able to spell 5-letter words entirely by sounding them out... an achievement that impressed his mother. Previously, all spelling words had to be drilled, letter by letter tediously, and caused parent and child much grief.

I hope to complete the Baby Deck real soon... by the next lesson if possible, although he still has two short vowels to contend with - "o" and the dreaded "e". Singaporean children seem to have a major problem with the short vowel sounds "a" and "e", simply because in Singlish, the two sounds are rather similar, if at all different. In relaxed conversation, even when I say "pat" and "pet", they sound the same... so it's difficult for them to hear and produce the two different sounds easily.

It's only been 2 weeks since I first met him, but already, the child is blossoming with a newfound confidence in himself. So wonderful to see.