Thursday, April 8, 2010

Dyslexia- How to teach a dyslexic child to read.

When you are teaching a child it is important to continuously watch his progress. Keep getting books that are progressively more difficult. It should not be too difficult that he becomes discouraged. Make sure story books are selected properly.

Like I mentioned in one of my earlier articles, I did not bother with revision exercises at all for the first two years. I believe every tuition teacher here just does exercise after exercise each and every time the child comes for tuition. John and I did just reading initially. Words the meaning of which he didn’t understand were listed down (by me) in an exercise book. I would also then write down the meaning. John would learn from this list every day until his vocabulary was very good. He learned to spell 3 sight words from the Dolch 220 words every day. In less than 3 months he could spell all the 220 words with ease. I believe in the concept of a little a day. 3 words a day seem like too little but in 3 months all the Dolch words are completed. With that most of the children’s books are easy to read. Think about this for a short while. My style of teaching has always been “A little a day” .

The following was the programme for my daily class with John:

1. Pronounce difficult words that he could not pronounce properly.
(These were words that he could not pronounce that I recorded in a note book.)
2. I read a page from a selected story book.
3. John then read the page I had read. (Initially I used to read one sentence and John would follow by reading that sentence).
4. I wrote down words he did not know the meaning of in an exercise book.
5. I went through words in his exercise book written the previous days and asked John for their meanings.
6. I taught 3 new Dolch words and revised the previous days’ Dolch words that he still could not spell.

The next day when he came for lesson, we went through the same routine. When we completed the lessons earlier than the allocated one hour I would fill in the time with jokes and riddles. My students looked forward to this part of the lesson. They excelled when it came to solving logical riddles. I usually did not give them the answer on the same day. I let them think about it and give me the answer the next day. They learnt a lot from the riddles and that was why I had added riddles in my lessons.

Do give me your comments on your child’s/student’s reaction to the riddles I have attached in my lessons.

For lesson 15 click here :

4 comments:

Azie Nazri said...

Salaam,

I'm doing a movie review based on a hindi movie, Taare Zameen Par, and was searching for information about Dyslexia in Malaysia, which led me to your blog.
Have read almost all of your posts and just want to tell you, that what you have in here is really great.
May Allah bless you.

Thank you.

Luqman Michel said...

Thank you Azie,
May Allah Bless you too.

Unknown said...

For my son, the short o sound in pot, cot and hot, was easy to pronounce within the context of the word (hot), but hard to pronounce by itself "o". I would stress in addition to this lesson, to isolate the pronounciation of the short o sound also till it becomes automatic. That was a thing my son experienced when learning short o.

Luqman Michel said...

Heidi, perhaps you could explain a bit more as I do not understand.