The dyslexia racket and the alternative

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Shortly after I started teaching in a secondary school, in the early seventies, I had a conversation with an eleven year old who had “bunked off” my English class, and who, I discovered, could not read. No-one had told me about this when I took over the class – a colleague asked me if I didn’t believe in “self-fulfilling prophecies” – and the deputy head told me with equanimity that “lots of boys in the first year can’t read”.

My response was to become a reading teacher, and from that time onward, I’ve been doing all I can to teach reading and other aspects of literacy as effectively as possible so that people will be able to read, with their problems either knocked out or severely cut down. After a few years, a certain amount of success and a couple of articles, I was introduced to an American book written during World War Two, with the educationally unfashionable title Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects, whose author, Grace Fernald, had developed simple and effective approaches to serious reading difficulties, including some caused by brain damage. She had done equally good work on basic arithmetic, and her insights into foreign languages coincided with work I’d done with children who had been failing in French (my degree subject).

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Reading Group marks 40 years of helping kids teach themselves

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These days, it’s not uncommon to hear about dyslexia or other learning disabilities.

But when The Reading Group began its work to help children with dyslexia and other challenges, people tended to think of it as a disease for a doctor to treat, said Marilyn Kay, the organization’s founder and its former executive director.

Research and common knowledge about the subject have come a long way in the last 40 years, she said, and so has The Reading Group.

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Treating Dyslexia Before Kids Learn to Read

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Treatment for dyslexia can begin even before children start learning to read, a new study suggests.

Researchers from Italy found that the learning disability may be linked to problems with children’s visual attention. They said their findings could lead to earlier diagnosis and new treatments for those with the condition.

“Visual attention deficits are surprisingly way more predictive of future reading disorders than are language abilities at the pre-reading stage,” Andrea Facoetti, of the University of Padua, said in a journal news release.

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How to Teach a Child to Read

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Although I had been taught to read with phonics, I was not taught our English alphabetic system as a system. The result is that I failed in teaching my mother to read. Had I known then what I know now, it would have been as easy as pie. That is why when President Clinton decided that we could solve America’s literacy problem by recruiting a million college students to tutor the children of America, I knew that his program was as phony as a three-dollar bill. If the so-called professional teachers couldn’t do the job, what made him think that a million ignorant college students could do it?

The reason why Alpha-Phonics worked so well is that after analyzing our English alphabetic system, I was able to break it down into segments, beginning with the simplest elements and moving ahead to the more complex elements. Each of the 128 lessons taught one simple phonetic element, so that at the completion of the program the student would have learned not only our entire alphabetic system but also how to teach it to someone else. Also, I used no pictures. By eliminating pictures, I eliminated guessing. In other words, the student had to learn the entire phonetic system in order to become a fluent, accurate reader.
If you want to teach your child, or a dyslexic relative, or a dropout to read, you can get the latest edition of Alpha-Phonics at the Chalcedon Foundation. However, if you are having any problem getting the latest edition, contact me by e-mail at slblu123@verizon.net.

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How music therapy became the key to literacy

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Erin was ready to try anything to get her 11-year-old son to learn to read. He was avoiding school at all costs, lagging behind his peers and disadvantaged by developmental dyslexia. Then, help came in an unexpected form.

A music therapist invited the Humpty Doo schoolkid to take part in a program called Art Stories.

“Ben was not very comfortable with reading and writing – he gets the letters back to front,” Erin Evans says.

“I have seen music therapy work before in different areas of health and well being, and I was grasping for any kind of assistance to get Ben to enjoy school and do some work in the classroom,” she said.

And so began a year-long journey which saw Ben not only learn to read, but take his new-found passion home with him.

“I used to not read at all, now I do a bit,” Ben says shyly.

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Student, 17, has designs on dyslexic help

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A TRELECH student, who could soon be a patented inventor thanks to an idea inspired by her sister, is looking for help to market her design.

Georgina Nichol-James, 17, of Caerwenog, Trelech, has designed a special educational toy, named the named X-ray i, designed to help dyslexic children improve their reading.

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