Explanation of my lessons

 

The lessons I have posted on my blog are very simple. Many of the lessons consist of only a few lines.

The lessons are designed to get the dyslexic/disengaged students back on track. They had disengaged from learning due to confusion as a result of the reasons explained in my post at LINK.

These lessons ensure that any disengaged student will soon learn the correct pronunciation of the consonants and also learn that letters represent more than one sound. This is the basic idea of my lessons.

The idea is to get the disengaged kids to unlearn what they have been taught wrongly.

I get them to memorise Dolch words (HFW) as they comprise 50 to 70% of words in a kid’s book.

I have repeatedly proven that any and all kids, except for those with acuity problems, will be able to memorise the Dolch words with ease.

If we teach only phonics as the SSP proponents insist, when will the child learn the pronunciation of the letter ‘o’ in the word ‘no’ which is different from the sound represented by the letter ‘o’ in the word ‘on’?

By the time a dyslexic kid reaches lesson 8 he is familiar with the sounds represented by most of the consonants.

Here is a list of the word families and the words made up of them.

Lesson 1 – ‘at’ – bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat.

Lesson 2 – ‘an’ – ban, can, fan, man, pan, ran, van.

Lesson 3 – ‘ap’ – cap, gap, lap, map, nap, rap, sap, tap.

Lesson 4 – ‘og’ – bog, cog, dog, fog, hog, jog, log, frog.

Lesson 5 & 6 are a continuation of family word ‘og’.

When he comes to lesson 7 all I need to do for him to read the following words is to give him the sound of the family word ‘ig’. He then reads the following words without any prompting.

Lesson 7 – big, dig, fig, jig, pig, rig, wig.

Later on in the lessons I teach kids how to figure out unfamiliar words by using word families as well as words they have learnt.

This should put paid to those who keep claiming that if we do not use phonics children will have to memorise thousands of words.