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.

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.

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.

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.