| Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty which can result in a significant and persistent difficulty with reading, spelling, written prose and often arithmetic. Dyspraxia can also affect literacy, in particular irregular spelling and arduous work production as well as problems with the concepts of maths.
Children with learning difficulties respond to teaching which engages their, visual, hearing and feeling senses. In practice this multi-sensory teaching involves presenting language via as many senses as possible. In order to exploit their strengths we lean towards the senses that are strongest in the pupil whilst we work to diminish and ultimately help them overcome their weaknesses.
We work to increase reading fluency and confidence, with the aim of maintaining or cultivating an interest in reading and to ensure that comprehension of text is proficient.
Spelling is taught through the understanding and use of rules and sight words learnt and overlearnt using pegs for remembering such as the use of mnemonics.
In addition we encourage the student to use their newfound skills in the production of creative and individual written work, study skills being introduced where appropriate.
Phonemic Awareness is the knowledge of sounds or phonemes in our language and how those sounds blend together to form words, phrases and sentences. Over the past 30 years research has shown an impressive amount of evidence that links children’s progress in learning to read to their phonological awareness. This supports the view that, when explicitly linked with reading, training in phonological awareness is effective in enhancing the progress of reading-delayed children. At our Centre we use various programs specifically produced to help phonological processing. Examples of the type of work covered are: sound and syllable blending, rhyme, and identification, discrimination and segmentation of phonemes.
The ability to think in mental pictures and to be able to manipulate these images in our mind is known as visual imagery, or visualisation. This is different to visual memory, which merely requires recall of an object and matching the recalled image with one presented. As such it is looking for ‘same’ or ‘different’. Imagery however does not require comparison with a real object – the recall, recognition and manipulation of an image takes place entirely within the circuitry of the subject’s brain. This ability is vital for learning.
Symbol Imagery is used to support phonemic awareness. This ability to visualize the sounds and letters within words is a vital component of reading and particularly spelling. It is necessary to teach this skill to children who can spell phonetically but cannot remember the visual patterns of words as the ability to recall a word image to mind is essential when spelling words that are not phonetic, or do not obey common rules of language.
>Comprehension can often prove difficult for children in our unit. Frequently they have to reread the material several times and can remember only a few details, rather than the “whole”. A primary cause of language comprehension problems is difficulty in an imaged gestalt – a whole. Concept imagery in taught within comprehension lessons as we work through the tasks teaching the children strategies to become efficient and accurate.
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