My first lesson with Jill

Give every day the chance to become the greatest day in your life (Mark Twain)

I start by teaching 3 to 5 Dolch words a day which I ask my students to memorise. Some of the Dolch words can be sounded out but I still get them to memorise them.

There are 220 Dolch words which can be found at: http://www.mrsperkins.com/dolch.htm

The reason for memorizing these words is that they (not all of them) are difficult to be sounded out. A few of these words will make it easy for you to understand why they are best to be memorized especially for the 10 to 20 % of kids: with, here, which etc.

My first lesson then continues into word families. My first set of word family is ‘at’. I sound the alphabets out (in the way they should be sounded and not as Jill has been taught) and teach them how to pronounce the alphabets ‘at’. Then I add suitable consonants to form words like – bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat and sat.

You may find the family words at the following site: https://www.google.com/search?q=family+words&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-ab

A disengaged child will be able to rattle off the above word families with ease.

Then you can use your imagination to form sentences for the child to read.  Here are some examples:

A fat cat

A fat rat

A cat and a rat

A cat and a rat sat on a mat

A hat on a bat

A rat and a cat sat on a bat

And so on ……..

I had all lessons on my web site with pictures I had asked a kampong (village) girl to draw and saved them on file den which just disappeared suddenly and all my files stored on file den were lost. I was dejected when this happened and my hopes of publishing a book for disengaged students was dashed as the girl who drew the diagrams for me left for studying in the university.

Anyway, you can easily prepare lessons using the word families as per the website above.

My lesson today with Jill was based on the above and I now confidently say she is a shut down kid. I will be able to help her to read within 4 months.

Be wary of people with a string of initials before and after their names who say that all those who cannot read at grade level are ‘dyslexic’.

Jim had told me the day I met him and again today that Jill cannot read and does not like to read. I know exactly her problem and now say that she will be able to read within 4 months of one hour session, 3 times a week.

My claim sounds as if it is boastful but what would I gain from being boastful. This statement is just to emphasise that many smart kids are being taught in a way unsuitable to them. If these kids are taught properly we will be able to reduce the illiteracy rate.

Jill was eager to learn and is glad to be able to read even from the first lesson.