Indice dei contenuti per January 2021 in Dystinct Magazine

EDITOR'S NOTE 2020 was a year like no other in many ways. However, to its credit, the year did offer us the gift of time to be present and observe our kids cope with their schoolwork as we tried our best to support them through remote learning. I’ve spoken to many parents who surprisingly felt like their kids did better being homeschooled than at school being sidelined year after year. I believe this is because of the time and individual attention they received from us and some of their teachers. The new year marks a clean slate, fresh beginnings, and new prospects. We have seized this opportunity to launch the first issue of the Dystinct magazine through which we hope to bring some new possibilities for families of dyslexic children.…

FROM SOUNDS TO SENTENCES JOCELYN SEAMER One of the big questions I hear foundation (Kindergarten/ prep/pre-primary/ reception/ transition) teachers ask is, “When should children be writing sentences?” I would like to answer this question as it relates to skills as well as age. To focus only on the ‘when’ as a consideration of age can lead us to ‘achieve’ this by any means possible, including having children copy scribed sentences and use word banks to copy the words rather than segmenting and writing themselves. Instead, we need to recognise the highly complex task that writing really is and be clear about what we need to see children doing to have confidence that they are well on the way to acquiring strong writing skills. WHEN SHOULD CHILDREN BE WRITING SENTENCES? It is useful at…

A Dystinct Journey DR. ERICA WARREN'S STORY Interviewed by Zahra Nawaz Editor | Dystinct Magazine This article wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention the author of this amazing resource, Dr. Erica Warren. Her remarkable story will leave parents of any dyslexic child hopeful of a successful future for their child. Dr. Warren has a busy private practice in New York, where she uses her unique multisensory approach to focus on compensatory learning strategies, cognitive interventions, and remedial reading, writing, and math. She has written over 500 blog posts, created over 100 resources and dedicated her life to serving those with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, Executive Functioning Disorder, and more. She also created a special degree program that united research and coursework in Educational Psychology, Special Education,…

CREATING SIGHT WORDS THE HARD WAY Sight words are clearly useful, but how are they created? There's a hard way and an easy way – and both are necessary for skilled reading and spelling to develop. The hard way is to rote-memorize the spelling of the word visually, without regard to the sound value of its letters. For a longer word, this is akin to memorizing passwords or phone numbers. Here are some examples of words (or other symbolic representations) where rote-memorization of the accompanying sound is a necessity: OF, ONE, CHOIR, YACHT, COLONEL, 7, @, $, and ?. The five words in this list are so irregular that sounding them out is not feasible. (To be regular, they would have to be spelled UV, WUN, KWIRE, YOT, and KERNAL.)…

The Book Leia says that she didn't set out to write a book as such. When she was freshly diagnosed with dyslexia at nine, she started writing about how she felt or what people said to her and started filing these notes away in a folder that she didn't allow anybody to see. Two weeks into writing, she felt like it would be nice to have it compiled neatly, so she got mum, Ayelet, to do the typing for her. One thing led to another, and mum got a blank book from a local art store and helped Leia print and cut out the text that was typed to fit the blank book's pages. Leia drew pictures to go with it and called it her book. The whole experience made…

FOR DYSLEXIC FAMILIES 81 POPULAR BOARD GAMES Games are an excellent way to get children off screens and to share some meaningful time together as a family. With the right choice of game, you could also sneakily get the kids to practice various skills such as logical reasoning, strategic planning, pattern recognition, simple mathematical calculations, hand-eye coordination, and more. However, when it comes to board or card games, we often worry about being inclusive of dyslexic children, so they don't get left out during a time that is meant to be fun for everybody involved. Here is a list of 81 board games that require little to no reading that dyslexic kids enjoy playing. 1 Qwirkle An award-winning pattern building board game of strategy which is fun and easy to…

Daily Modelled Writing Outline Lesson Plan STEP 01 Display a picture Show a stimulus picture relating to something familiar (or previous learning) STEP 02 Model the STEP language Think out loud about the picture, modelling language STEP 03 TTYP Talk To Your Partner Students talk with a partner about the stimulus picture STEP 04 Student Share Call on 2 or 3 non volunteers to share their ideas STEP 05 Oral sentence construction Teacher uses student ideas to construct a sentence orally STEP 06 MTYT My Turn Your Turn My turn, your turn with the new sentence STEP 07 Joint construction Teacher & Student jointly construct the sentence on the board (focus on punctuation, Fred fingers, spaces) STEP 08 Read the STEP sentence Teacher and students read the sentence together Sentence Writing Development a Student…

CREATING SIGHT WORDS THE EASY WAY ORTHOGRAPHIC MAPPING Calling this second way of creating sight words "easy" is a bit of a misnomer – at least at the beginning. At the beginning, this manner of creating sight words is difficult too, as it has some requisite skills that themselves take time and effort to master. Researchers call this second mode of sight word learning orthographic mapping – OM for short. Let's see what it involves. Orthographic mapping is simply a process whereby a word's exact spelling is stored in permanent, long-term memory as a sight word. Words are mapped, one at a time, into an individual's long-term memory (orthographic lexicon) if that reader has the skills needed to make all the connections between the graphemes seen in an unknown word's…

CONCLUSION Teaching the skill of reading is not as complex as many teachers and parents might believe. Written text is simply a code for our 44 speech sounds. We need only explicitly show our children how this code works, and most of them will, with delight, quickly catch on. Kids love codes. Kids love making weird sounds – sounds just like the 44 isolated phonemes. And kids especially love making weird sounds if their teacher or parent is willing to make those sounds with them. And, more than any other delight in the early stages of learning to read, kids love to determine what an unknown word is, all on their own, by decoding it. Balanced Literacy, a method for teaching reading used in many schools, starts reading instruction with…

HOMESCHOOLING SUCCESS A conversation with Kate Spragg Popular media is mostly biased toward homeschooling families, but we love a good homeschooling success story. We asked Kate, Noah's mum a few questions to understand how she managed to transform Noah's educational outcome through homeschooling. Q What worked best for you when you were homeschooling. Can you please share a hack or two that will be helpful for parents homeschooling right now? "My boys were homeschooled at different times. When I made the decision to homeschool Noah, he wasn't in a good space, so he needed time to get over school before we could move forward. I connected with other homeschool families through Free2Learn in Brisbane so both Noah and I could learn from them. We will be forever grateful for the…

END OF FOUNDATION EXPECTATIONS For Reading and Writing According to Australian Curriculum Jocelyn Seamer Phonics Blend sounds orally to read consonant-vowel-consonant words Students need to know the most common sounds represented by ALL letters as well as how to read with the most common diagraphs (sh, the, ng, ch). High Frequency Words Read high-frequency words This does not mean that students know 100 'sight words' but rather that they can read a bank of irregular, high frequency words that appear in their decodable texts. These words should be words such as 'the', 'was' & 'is' which contain graphemes the children have not yet learned rather than 'at', 'that', 'in' which can be sounded out easily. Blending Blend sounds orally to read consonant-vowel-consonant words In order to read fluently, foundation children…

Favourite character and why? He tells us that 'Punisher' is his favourite comic book character as that's what got him into comics. He also loves spiderman. He had an interesting perspective to add. Punisher and Spiderman never really get to win. They get on top of a mountain, but there's always another mountain. It's about the battle and the struggles and overcoming them and then just moving onto more struggles and being ok with that. I could relate to that in my life. When asked about what he has been doing between school, and now, he tells us that he didn't have many expectations for himself. When he landed a job at McDonald's, he was delighted. He spent five whole years at McDonald's, where his biggest challenge was how structured…

WHAT IS A SIGHT WORD? The brain's Language Center, however, has no built-in circuitry for reading and spelling (cf. Sally Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia, Ch 5). The ingenious code that underlies those skills is a human invention that developed only a few thousand years ago. That's a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms – and too recent for evolution to have developed specialized brain circuits for handling symbolic speech whose characters (letters) enter the brain via the eyes instead of the ears. As a child starts learning to read and spell, a third lexicon is created in the brain and linked to the two already there. This orthographic lexicon will slowly (at first) accumulate the exact letter sequence of each word the reader learns to recognize at a glance, that…

PHONEMIC AWARENESS Clearly, blending phonemes and segmenting phonemes requires children to have an "awareness" of phonemes. But is there more to the topic of Phonemic Awareness (PA) than blending and segmenting? Should PA training be done without letters, as oral-only exercises? Should PA training include phoneme manipulations such as deletion, substitution, and reversal? What's essential and what isn't? Let's see what top reading researchers, and national inquiries in the US and UK, have to say. The US National Reading Panel (2000) “The process of decoding words never read before involves transforming graphemes into phonemes and then blending the phonemes to form words with recognizable meanings. The PA skill centrally involved in decoding is blending. Another way to read words is from memory, sometimes called sight word reading. This requires prior…

A Dystinct Journey LEIA SCHWARTZ Leia wrote the book 'Dyslexic Renegade' at the age of nine, the same year she was diagnosed with dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and ADHD. Interviewed by Zahra Nawaz Editor | Dystinct Magazine She lives in New York with her supportive family and therapy pets, which includes three dogs and three birds. Leia and mum Ayelet had a little chat with us over Zoom to share their dyslexia journey. Leia started experiencing difficulties associated with dyslexia at about second grade when she was having trouble learning to read and do maths. "My teachers were rude; they would just say if you can't do it, then just don't do it, or they asked me to sit out of activities that every-body else in the class was doing," says…

High Frequency Words? Sight Words? Is there a Difference Dr. Deb Glaser Most teachers I know strive to make sure that their students are able to read “sight words” automatically. If you are a kindergarten through second grade teacher reading this, the previous statement makes sense to you. But does it really? Let me explain. High frequency words are those common words that occur, well, frequently in printed text. There are many lists of high frequency words to choose from out there. Dolch words, Fry words – they are essentially lists of the same words. Most lists order the words by frequency, listing the words from the most frequent words that appear in print – the is the most common – to the less frequent – view is listed as word 1000…