Saturday, March 6, 2010

Lesson 2

I forgot to mention. Please feel free to print these lessons.

This is the best time to introduce another sound represented by the letter ‘a’. This sound for ‘a’ is ‘er’. Compare this with the first ‘a’ that your student learnt – ‘a’ – ‘air’. Make sure that he understands this well.


Read the whole story with your finger below the word you read. A better method will be to place a short ruler below the sentence. Dyslexic children have a problem with shifting down to the next sentence. This problem will, in time, be eliminated naturally. Read the story a second time and ask the student to repeat after you. Do this as many times as it takes before asking him to try and read it himself.

Having read the story, sound out the letters in the first vocabulary section and let him repeat after you. Read out the vocabulary in the second section as sight words. Many of the words in the 'sight word' section can be read phonetically but just trust me and read them as sight words. This simply means not sounding out. Your student will learn it automatically. I will try and introduce between 3 and 5 sight words in each lesson. Get him to learn to spell these sight words as they will be found in most of the story books that your student will read. Once he learns the 220 Dolch sight words he will be able to read most of the story books with a little help from you to read unfamiliar words.


To digress a little, I would say that all adult readers are 'sight readers'. We do not sound out words according to 'phonic'. When we look at a word we know what it is and how it sounds and we do not look at the letters at all. There are many who read whole sentences without looking at the individual words. Unfortunately I am not one of them. There are those who read a whole page at a glance. So, believe me, he will learn sight words as they arise and very soon all words will be sight words to him.

The last page is a repetition of the story without the pictures. When he reads this page then you can be assured that he is actually reading the words. Remember my story on Ted – the child who had astigmatism? Well, sometimes a student will be reading the story very well when in fact he has memorized the story and reading it by looking at the pictures.

The delay in posting my lessons is because I cannot draw and it took time to find a suitable artist.

On Tuesday I will try and post something very controversial - Dyslexia myth.

For the lesson click here:

The next lesson will be on Wednesday.

5 comments:

Hena Anwar said...

Hi Luqman, i have taken a great interest in this blog as it reminds me of the website www.globalphonics.co.uk as the books on their take a similar approach.
I am conducting some research in the learning material that dyslexic people use and would i would really appreciate your help.
The client that i am resarching for is wanting me to create a new website which is dyslexic friendly. Are there any specific tips you can give me?

Unknown said...

One of the tricks I useto use to help navigate the page is to use a flexable ruler. This meant that words on the line you are reading are more visable and I lost my place less often. Others may have a different point of view.

Luqman Michel said...

Thanks for you input bit.Your views are highly appreciated.

Anonymous said...

Hi, I find your blogs helpful but none of the lesson links are working... I tried a couple of them and they all seem to be down...

Luqman Michel said...

Thank you. I must have clicked something wrongly when file-den asked me to confirm something a while ago. I am afraid I do not know how to rectify it. Will ask my son Hakim when he returns for holidays in July. Regret any inconvenience caused.