Does the ‘Dyslexia’ Label Help or Hamper Teachers?

Many parents feel like they get more support for their child if they have an ‘official’ label.  Perhaps they believe they will acquire explicit support, testing accommodations, or that a diagnosis will provide directed attention in classes. They most-likely expect teachers and special education teams can better plan lessons, if they know the diagnosis behind their child's difficulties.

 

"Knowing what the difficulties are" is exactly the issue: 

Dyslexia - though at times useful for the above reasons - is an umbrella term for reading difficulties unrelated to a child's intelligence. That doesn’t give teachers any explicit reasons for the basis of those difficulties. They could be visual, or phonological, related to memory deficits, or more.  Additionally, a recent study by the British Psychological Association found that the dyslexia label actually hampers teachers in a very profound way:

"[teachers felt] the label ‘dyslexia’...was seen as a fixed disability, and that the teachers believed their ability to help children with ‘dyslexia was unlikely to develop over time. By contrast, [with the label] ‘reading difficulties’, [they] were less likely to see the children’s problems as permanent; were also more likely to believe that they would be able to help them, and that their skills developed with experience."

All teachers want their students to achieve their full potential and more. However, this psychological research seems to show that by removing supposedly fixed labels, teachers feel they can try to change a child’s literacy trajectory.

Should We Shed Labels Altogether?
This is not to say we should scrap the term altogether! But it is valuable food for thought on the question of how helpful it is for teachers from a psychological perspective.  It also raises the question: Are our teachers adequately trained to meet the diverse needs of their students?

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Sarah Forrest is a Literacy Specialist for the Easyread System. Easyread is an online intervention for children with reading difficulties, dyslexia, auditory processing problems and more. www.easyreadsystem.com

Novelist Sally Gardner's Poem for Dyslexics Everywhere

The brilliant Sally Gardner is an award-winning British children's novelist. She's written Coriander, Maggot Moon, I, The Silver Blade and more... and she is severely dyslexic. 

Growing up as the child of two lawyers in London, she couldn't read until age fourteen. Her teachers repeatedly told her she would never make anything of herself. She turned to art and spent many years as a theater set designer before returning to her original love: writing.  

For Dyslexia Awareness Week in early November of this year, she put together a poem for dyslexic children and adults everywhere.

Disobey Me, a poem by by Sally Gardner

They told me I was dyslexic

it didn’t describe me

belonged in the library

of words I can’t spell

no matter how many times they tell

you just try harder sound it out

simple when you think about

it....

To keep reading this moving poem in its full form, click here.

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Sarah Forrest is a Reading Specialist for the Easyread System, an online program for children struggling with reading and spelling. Get a free 10-day trial at www.easyreadsystem.com

Helping Dyslexic Students Over the Summer

How to Make Learning Part of your Summer Routine

Sunny days, swimming pools, Crocs, staying up past bedtime, and no homework!  That’s what kids think of when June arrives and school lets out.  For most kids the time off is a delight, a much needed respite from the intensity of the school year and the mastery of a year’s curriculum. 

Have you noticed that when your kids return to school they spend September and the first part of October reviewing everything they learned in April and May?  Have you wondered why that is?  Well, two to three months off from learning is a long time and memory for newly learned material tends to decay quickly, so by the time kids get back to school after a summer of duly earned fun and play, many of their skills have deteriorated.  They need review to get back to the skill level they demonstrated in June.

Children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia can’t afford to take so much time off from learning, the cost is too great.  Your child worked hard to acquire the skills she learned this year—you saw how hard it was.  She put in sustained effort, practiced, worked with specialists and tutors, and even with that support has to strive to hold onto every bit of skill she acquired.

The learning curve for children who have dyslexia differs from that of a typical learner.  While another child may retain a word after seeing it 2-5 times, your child may need to see it 40-50 times, even more to be able to read it fluently or spell it.  The repetition provided by specialized teachers and the practice you support every night through word rings, Wilson homework, read alouds, and flashcards is designed to provide the exposure, rehearsal, and application that a dyslexic child needs to retain essential foundation knowledge.  The consequence of the summer break for that child is much greater loss of knowledge and skill than is typical of most.  Catch up in the fall is thus insufficient to get him back to where he was in June.  He has lost too much ground and it will take too long to regain his traction.

Here are some activities you can use over the summer at home to reinforce this year’s progress.  The goal is not to gain ground or learn more, but rather to maintain hard earned footing:

Keep reading!  During the year your child reads to herself and you read to her (I hope).  Daily reading activities shouldn’t change, except perhaps to increase as there is more flexibility in scheduling.  In addition to selecting high interest books, it can also be helpful to read aloud some of the books she will encounter in next year’s curriculum, so that she will be familiar with the material.

Practice math facts: Road trips, family dinners, and during a game of catch are great times to practice basic math facts.  You may think these have been mastered, but they tend to decay without use and next year’s math will require more efficient recall of math facts for higher level calculations.

Find fun ways to use math everyday:  For example, have a lemonade stand.  Bake: reading a recipe and measuring ingredients uses knowledge of fractions and working memory.  Visit the local dollar general store and have your child calculate how much money they need for items (don’t forget the tax) and how much change they should expect.  Do a construction or sewing project; these involve measurement, planning, and checking one’s work.  Have your child calculate the tip when you eat in a restaurant.

Visit museums, historical sites, or other venues that build on subject matter that your child learned about last year or will learn about next year:  Hands-on and visual experiences are so very valuable to a child’s understanding of an historical period, place, or series of events.  For example, if your child studied the Civil War, a visit to Gettysburg may be in order.  If they learned about the prehistoric period, visit a natural history museum.  Finally, for geology go to a natural park.

Keep a summer journal: You and your child could even coauthor a journal.

A summer academic program or tutoring may be in order:  This keeps your child's mind in the game and can both enrich and solidify learning in areas of particular need (or strength) for your child. 

Don’t forget about technology:  We know our children love their screens so find a few good educational apps that they can use on the way to the beach or during downtime at home.  Summer is also a good time for older children to practice typing using a web-based program, get used to audiobooks, and master the use of voice to text technology.

Making learning a part of your summer routine keeps your child’s mind engaged and will make fall a much more pleasant time as he enters next year’s classroom feeling confident and ready to learn.

Enjoy summer!

Jennifer

Jennifer Jackson Holden, Psy.D. is managing director of the Paoli, Pennsylvania office of the Center for Psychological Services. 

Predicting Reading Problems?

Parents often ask: “How do I identify if my child is at risk for developing a reading disability, such as dyslexia?”

At one time, we had to wait until a child was in school and learning to read to identify reading problems.  Now we know that there are risk factors we can identify much earlier.  This lets us intervene when a child is younger and, generally speaking, earlier intervention has better outcomes. 

The early clues to potential reading problems are easy to spot when you know what they are.  All you have to do is listen to your child speak.  

Listen for subtle sounds that tell you your child’s language skills are not developing as they should.  It’s easier than it sounds because fuzzy phonemes (phonemes are the individual sounds that produce words. For example, the word cat has 3 phonemes /c/+/a/+/t/)  leave a distinct mark on everyday language in highly predictable ways by influencing how a child pronounces certain words, sings nursery rhymes, and learns the names of sounds of the letters of the alphabet.

Here are the things to look for:

Clue #1: Delay in Speaking

As a general rule, children speak their first words around their first birthday, use phrases between 18-24 months of age, and can engage in a conversation, tell a short story, and answer “why” questions between their 3rd and 4th birthdays.

Are there signs that your child's speech is delayed: 

• First word at 15+ months?
• Speaking phrases after age 2?
• Having difficulty with conceptual words at age 3 and later such as over/under, before/after, few/more, give/take, left/right?

Clue #2: Pronunciation

Baby talk is appropriate in the first few years of life. However, by age 5 or 6, children should have little trouble pronouncing most words correctly and when they do make errors their mispronunciations should be easy to correct.

• Does your child struggle to pronounce new words or articulate long/complicated words?
• Does he sound like he is tripping over the individual sounds (phonemes) in a word as they come out of his mouth? Or does he leaves sounds out of words?  For example, a child who calls spaghetti “pisgetti” or an elephant “lelephant” long past the age when such words should be spoken correctly.  

Clue #3: Rhyming

What an important skill this is to learn in preschool!  When a child can rhyme, we know that she is able to break words down into the smaller segments of sound that different words can share. This is a strong indicator of getting ready to read and it’s why educational psychologists and educators encourage parents to read nursery rhymes ad nauseam (Oh, so that’s why!).  Children should be able to make rhymes by age 4. 

When a child has early reading problems, he has trouble penetrating the sound structure of words and so is less sensitive to rhyme. Does your child:

• Confuse sounds that sound alike?
• Have trouble hearing the rhyme in a poem or song?

If so, she may not be understanding the phonemes that make two words sounds alike, because she is not understanding that a word is made-up from a sequence of individual sounds.

CLUE #4: Word Retrieval

Word retrieval problems occur when a child knows what he wants to say but cannot pull the right words from his memory.  Does your child:

• Talk around a word so that his speech is punctuated by “umm…” and “uh…”?
• Describe a word but not name it?
• Point instead of speaking?
• Use the wrong phoneme, for example saying “volcano” when he means “tornado”?
• Does he use imprecise words, such as “things” or “stuff” rather than naming what he wants?

Clue #5: Knowledge of the Alphabet

Learning to read involves “breaking the code”—coming to understand that words are comprised of sounds that correspond to letters and that when these sounds are blended together they produce words that can be represented visually.  Learning letter sounds is critical for reading and is intricately linked to learning the names of the letters.  Fuzzy phonemes interfere with the beginning reader’s ability to learn the names and sounds of the letters in the alphabet.

Here is your developmental chart for knowledge of the alphabet: 

• Age 3: learns to sing ABC’s.  Your child can now sing this song, though the alphabet is an undifferentiated string from A to Z.  In this stage, LMNOP is often sung as one letter.
• Age 4: Your child should begin to recognize and name individual letters.
• Age 5: As your child enters kindergarten she should know the name of most upper and lower case letters.
• Age 6: By the end of kindergarten he should know all his letters and their corresponding sounds.

Now you know what to look for.  Soon we’ll talk about what to do when you see these warning signs.  Now, go listen to your kids!

Be well,

Jennifer