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).

It is Official!!!

"Application for exemption from Mother Tongue - APPROVED"

Finally... we are free from the burden of Chinese... for Stacey that is... so no more Chinese exams this year and forever more! Yeah! My heart leapt with joy when I saw the official looking envelope from Stacey's school today... and when I saw the words above, I did a happy jig all the way to the kitchen to announce it to hubby... who was most amused by my dancing. Haha. But I am so glad that our battle with Chinese homework and Chinese teachers is now over!!!!

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.

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.

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.

Stacey's progress

It's a fine line as usual, treading between challenging Stacey and not demoralising her... but she's getting a little complacent with the easier words and complains whenever the words are a little more complex and she's required to think... and she hates making mistakes...

So in order to motivate her to put her whining and attitude aside, I've got to entice her with games and such...

We've moved into the vowel digraphs... having just covered "oy" yesterday... and with that came the concept of positions...

We also recapped syllabication because I want her to move into Penny words on Saturday... and that will lead us into open syllables with long vowels... but she already knows long vowels, so I don't think that will be a problem.

We're also working on more spelling words based on rules... so looking at what to look out for, so that she knows when she has to apply a rule. But really, it's also building up her visual memory bank, so that she's exposed to the words many many times over so that she gets so familiar.

I had a proud mommy moment the other day when she successfully applied the FLOSS rule to her tamagotchi pet in naming it Bess... when I heard her say she wanted to name her pet /bes/, I thought that she would spell it as "Bes"... so I was pleasantly surprised to see that she had applied her floss rule successfully and had remembered to double the "s" at the end...

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...

Moving along nicely...

Stacey is finally moving into the vowel pairs... this one will be really tricky.

The last lesson, I taught her the rules for /k/= c, k and /j/ = dge, j, g, ge. And because her first vowel pair was "oi", I also had to teach her that it came in the middle of the word, to be followed up the next lesson with "oy" which is essentially the same sound, different position.

So there we go... and because I promised her a game after, she zipped through the lesson, even right through the difficult dictation and spelling, and so we worked on more spelling without her "feeling" the burden of spelling by using the spelling cards... heh.

So we happily made words back and forth, using the new and old sounds, and examining the rules behind each word that was formed... she so enjoys manipulating the cards.

I need to keep bumping her up... her reading is getting more fluent now, even though we don't do much reading per se (meaning passages) in OG classes... so despite that her reading is improving, and that pleases and encourages me and her. All in all, good!

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.

Reptiles, Rabbits and Rules...

On Saturday, Stacey went through more Reptile words, Rabbit words, and learnt a new rule regarding the -ld, -nd and -st words... so no new phonogram for her.

It occurs to me that she should also be learning the rules for the c/k/ck sounds, the j/dge/ge sounds, the ch/tch sounds and so on... because she's starting to get confused about which sound to use, as her repertoire of sounds expand. So I will be looking to see where exactly it falls in the Scope and Sequence of things, and how to incorporate it all in. I also need to look into making lessons more fun... now that I am trying to follow the OG lesson plans more closely, I find myself not having enough time to do the fun things and cover everything in the lesson plans as well. So it's going to be a little give and take. Otherwise, OG lessons become such a chore.

I bought the Go Phonics set of games and readers and stuff, so I have to start incorporating all that into the lessons. Stacey is always thrilled to play games, even if she is exercising the very same skills, just that she doesn't have to write it out on a sheet of paper. *grin*

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.

Reptile Words

Moved Stacey along in the Scope and Sequence of things... she's been stuck far too long in the basic level, in part due to our lack of time, in part due to our using most of OG sessions to tackle her Spelling tests.

I have decided that OG lessons will be strictly OG lessons. Spelling Test Preparation will just have to be on another day, at another time. Because otherwise, Stacey will never move on.

Today she moved onto Reptile Words, having done the magic-e words for the longest time. She learnt to draw a rainbow for the v-c-e vowel, as well as to swoop for bigger words so as to be able to keep track of the patterns that are in the word.

Her face lit up as she successfully dissected 3 3-syllable words, made up entirely of the vccv patterns, including reptile words. Wonderful!

I haven't moved her on to spelling the words yet. That will be my next goal. Once she's very familiar with the rabbit and reptile words, I will try spelling these words with her.

So today, she tackled a new phonogram "all", a new syllabication pattern as well as a new learned word (which admittedly she was already half familiar, so it wasn't difficult at all).

She's coming along nicely... I'm so proud of her.

Oh, and I beamed with pride when I realised that she had named her Tamagotchi pet "Bess" and had remembered to double the "s" at the end because it is a short word after a short vowel. Beautiful. And she did that without reminder or asking. I remember her saying she wanted to name her pet "bes" but somehow, I thought she'd spell it "Bes"... so when I saw that she doubled the "s", I was most pleased... : )

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....

Being Accomodated...

Stacey's teacher just called. It's the end of Week 4 now, and she and the EL HOD have finally decided to accomodate Stacey's needs by giving her only 5 spelling words instead of 10, in addition to the dictation passage that she has to learn.

I also requested that Stacey's teacher move the Spelling Day to Tuesday or Wednesday in order for Stacey to have more time to learn her spelling because having it on a Monday meant that she had to learn it way before and hope that she still remembered it by Monday since we don't have any time on Sunday to really learn it... and now Stacey's teacher has told me that next week onwards, the Spelling will be moved to Tuesday!!! Woohoo!!! That would help make all the difference in the world! Yay!

Her teacher this year is a little less systematic though... in that last year's teacher chose the 5 words based on words that Stacey would more likely need... but this year's teacher is just picking the top row (her words are organised on her list in two rows) for her to learn. Guess that will do too...

All in all, good news!!!!

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.