One Little Word

One of the things I love about Twitter is how sometimes it throws up something that really resonates with where I am at the moment. The other day it was Stephanie's post about her #blogaday challenge. Today, it was a link to this post by Lisa Dabbs about the One Little Word challenge.  I thought that this sounded familiar. Sure enough, Lisa linked through to Ali Edwards' site.  I knew Ali from my scrapbooking days. I own several of her books and even met her when she came to NZ in 2006.

I remember when she started her One Little Word challenge. It didn't grab me then. Just the pressure of choosing a word to live with throughout the year seemed too much. So I forgot about it and got on with things. Fast forward to 2015 and a few life changes. I suddenly realised when I saw Lisa'a post that this was what I wanted as a focus for the year. Not a bunch of random resolutions that I would probably forget about in a month or two. Rather a word I could hang reflections on and that would (hopefully) spur me to do what I needed to do.

And there it was. The word. DO. Somehow, it just felt right. It is a very small word but I think a good one to go forward with in 2015.

New Year Blogging Goal

I have never really been one to make New Year's resolutions but perhaps this year I will make an exception. 2014 was actually pretty good for me (especially compared to the previous two years). We welcomed a new kitten into our family, the offspring both had good years at school, I passed a Te Reo Māori course with distinction and I finally got my first teaching job (which unfortunately finished at the end of December). Which is all good but it means I am back to square one in 2015 -  applying for jobs, getting endless rejection letters, watching the bank account go backwards.... Unemployment is not all it is cracked up to be.

I have been thinking for some time that I must stop neglecting this blog. I used to blog almost daily in a previous life but I seem to have lacked motivation for some years, partly (or mostly) because unemployment didn't give me a lot to blog about. I read a lot of interesting, education related material but, without a class of my own, I didn't feel that I was able to add anything to the discussion.

The New Year has given me pause to reflect. I realised that I was probably trying too hard to be "professional" and that was getting in the way of my natural voice. I am hoping that if I relax a bit more, I will write more. Yesterday, I stumbled across Stephanie's #blogaday post and that inspired me to set a goal for myself to blog at least once each week in 2015. I am usually pretty good at achieving specific goals I set for myself so I am hoping this will motivate me to get writing. So 2015, here I come!

Hour of Code - My Robotic Friends

Having no computers was no barrier to two year 3 classes participating in the  world-wide Hour of Code* yesterday. We chose an "unplugged" activity with plenty of hands-on collaboration to (hopefully) engage the children and get them thinking. The Thinkersmith tutorial we chose included a full lesson plan which helped reduce our workload - always a bonus!

We started off the lesson (as recommended) discussing robots and how we communicate with them which led nicely on to introducing the My Robotic Friends activity. We briefly went over our goal (to stack cups a certain way) and showed the children the code we would be using. We then modelled the activity. My colleague left the room and the children and I co-constructed the code needed to make a simple stack of cups on the IWB, a child doing the recording. My colleague then came in and attempted to follow the code. It soon became clear that coders would need to write clearly!

Once we successfully completed that task, we split the children into groups of three. The "robots" (one per group, pre-chosen to save time) went into the other classroom for "training", while the "coders" stayed with me. Both the coders and robots had a set of cups to help them with their task. The coders were given one of five different cup stacks to make.

Once they had written their code, they sent for their robot who had to recreate the stack only using the code. Some groups found that they needed to send their robot away so they could adjust their code. Once successful, a new robot was chosen and the coders were given a different stack to make.

In our reflection at the end of the lesson, the children noted how important it was that the coders knew what each instruction meant, what order it needed to go in and (again) that the code was clearly written! It was a fantastic learning experience with the children thoroughly engaged and the key competencies of using language, symbols and text, thinking, managing self,  and relating to others being exercised.


* The 'Hour of Code' is a nationwide [hmm- perhaps should be world-wide!] initiative by Computer Science Education Week[csedweek.org] and Code.org [code.org] to introduce millions of students to one hour of computer science and computer programming.

Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing - Week 3

Audition

• Audition is a broad area of processing. Audition is how the brain makes sense of the sounds it receives from the ears.
• Speech sounds can differ due to duration, pitch, loudness (vowels are louder), stress syllables
• Auditory perception is not one thing

Vision

• Visual part is not typically the primary cause of dyslexia
• Motion perception/ eye movement problems
• Visual stress - seeing highly contrasting visual images - providing special glasses or coloured overlays that seem to reduce visual stress.Research evidence is mixed for these solutions.
• Magnocellular theory - - evidence also mixed - cause or effect?
• Visual attention - the brain is deciding what to attend to. May find it easier to read a smaller window of text - may be better for some people.

Attention

• Attention can be hyperactive or inattentive
• If attention is not on instruction, can miss vital parts of instruction
• May take approximate approach to reading - eg may miss words, change small words
• If child has decoding issue, find reading frustrating - may show similar patterns
• Different causes can cause similar behaviours - or can be an issue with both!
• Children with a more primary reading issues tend to have bigger phonological issues.
• If you read comprehension questions to a child with dyslexia, they can sometimes perform better without demands of decoding. Children with attention issues may show the reverse.
• Do attention issues only occur at reading time?

Maths

• Up to 60% of dyslexic children have issues with maths
• A lot of rote learning in maths - difficult for those with dyslexic tendencies
• Then don't have the foundations on which to build
• Dyslexics can have issues with sequencing - challenge in maths
• Focus on concepts rather than rote learning can help
• Symbols can look very similar to dyslexic people
• Word problems - different words used. Abstract, relational terms
• Need to instil competence in early years

Dyspraxia

• Difficulties in motor control, automatisms and spacial temporal organisation.
• Difficulty in dressing, coordinate hands and legs to ride a bike, tie shoelaces etc
• Appear to be clumsy
• difficulty in reading time
• Computer is useful because they find it hard to hold a pencil
• Verbal intelligence is normal, sometimes superior
• Visual/Spacial ability problematic
• Difficulty with geometory - adaption - ask them to explain problem and you write or use app
• Use computer as early as eight.
• Often goes hand in hand with dycalcula

Oral Language Impairment

• Phonemes often fuzzier
• Non-dyslexic learners ignore unimportant variations while dyslexic learners tend to notice them - although this is controversial.
• Difficulties in identifying fast temporal changes in oral language
• Specific Language Impairment often comes with dyslexia.

Psychological Effects

• Need more effort to succeed and not rewarded with results
• Anxiety and depression
• Can have a significant impact on the justice system
• Need self-esteem to learn
• Self-perception if negative difficult to deal with difficulties
• Teacher has central role to recognise all children at school
• Dyslexic child who experiences failure at school can develop four types of behviour:
• Inhibition
• Regression - requires attention, doesn't think by themselves
• Projection - tries to ignore difficulties but will notice them in others and make fun of them, perhps violence
• Displacement - get validation in other domains
• Results often do not match the huge efAdvantage that dyslefort put in
• Teachers must make sure they recognise the other abilities of these children

Positive Aspects

• People with dyslexia can excel often in eg visualising things in 3D space 
• Dyslexics have more of their brain for visual information
• Professions where dyslexics excel - architect, engineer, designer, TV presenter, poet, singer, entrepreneur, salesperson

Pros and Cons of Labelling

• Advantages - relief to put a word on something; some countries will allow adaptations at school
• Disadvantages - sometimes child will give up; in some school systems then can get packaged intervention which doesn't always help; labels easy to give, hard to take away

Kupu o te Wiki - Marama

Ka whiti te marama i te pö.

How to Identify Reading Difficulties

Week 2 of the Supporting Children with Difficulties in Reading and Writing.

Definition and Causes

• Dyslexia is a neurologically-based condition, which is often hereditary. It results in problems with reading, writing and spelling. Also usually associated with difficulties in concentration, short term memory and organisation.

• Dyslexia is NOT caused by poor schooling or home background or by poor motivation for learning. It does not clinically manifest with poor sight, hearing or muscle control - although it may occur with these conditions.

• Matthew effect - if child struggles to decode they will read less texts over time, exposed to less new vocabulary and so results in lower vocabulary level compared to peers later on.

• Why do children have these problems? 

• Decoding struggles - these children tend to struggle with phonological processing. Problem with manipulating sounds in words.Dyslexia usually associated with visual problems and there are often these as well but primarily it is a phonological issue. Harder to automatically link sounds and letters.Also might be a separate matter with speed of processing which can exacerbate the phonological issues.

• Strong genetics component to dyslexia caused by mulitple genes. Continuum of effect.

•  Early intervention critically important. Children who are late talkers often go on to have reading difficulties.

Identification - Pre-Primary

• Dyslexia exists from birth.
• Risk factors for dyslexia (not to be considered in isolation - combination of risk factors and consistency over time) before the child learns to read: 
        
1. Dyslexia in the family. Did parents, grandparents have difficulties reading and writing?
2. Ambidextrous, difficulty establishing manual preference.
3.  Persistent confusion between left and right.
4. Inability to appreciate rhymes in nursery rhymes and songs.
5. Difficulty following a rhythm and reproducing it.
6. Difficulty learning songs or poems by rote.
7. Difficulty naming familiar objects - finds it hard to access the name of something even if it is known.
8. Difficulty in following a sequence of instructions.. They have a difficulty with short term memory.
9. Difficulty in saying words - will confuse sound order. 
10. Difficulty with organisation and frequent loss of personal items.
11. Difficulty with time and space eg before/after, tomorrow/yesterday. 

Identification - Primary

• Things to look for (persistent over time):
        
1. Auditory confusion between similar phonemes eg buh/puh/duh.
2. Visual confusion between graphemes that are similar eg p/q, n/u, f/t.
3. Inversion between letter and syllables.
4. Addition of letters, syllables or affixes.
5. Omissions of elements of words.
6. Substitution of words, guessing words.
7. Contraction or de-contraction. Misusing word boundaries.
• Other behaviours:
        
1. Lose the thread of what they are reading. Re-read the line two times without being aware they are doing it.
2. Read/write a text in present tense instead of the past or future.
3. Very inconsistent autography - same word spelled in several different ways in same piece of writing.
4. Ignoring punctuation, no intonation.
5. Writing is very slow.
6. Fatigue. First long OK, end of product mistakes

Informal Assessment

• Combination of several symptoms, frequency despite your correction ad persistence over time.
• Examine phonological awareness in child. Difficulty in manipulating sounds of language.
• Complexity differs - syllables are easier than onset rimes which are easier than phonemes.
• Important to pronounce pure sounds eg t not "tuh"
• Eight tasks:
        
1. Generation - get child to generate words containg the same ending, final syllable or rime as a target word.
2. Detection - give three words to child and find odd one out. Child has to retain words in memory and give answer.
3. Blending - syllable give me the whole word "te-le-vi-sion"; onset rime - what do you get when you join up "tr and ap; phoneme - c a n a l
4. Segmentation - Give child word and divide into syllables, onset rime and phonemes.
5. Deletion - syllable eg say word cabin, now say it again without "ca", phoneme - meat say it again without m.
6. Substitution - track - what would happen to it if I replaced tr with cr.
7. Phoneme Fusion - first phoneme of two words eg big apple = ba
8. Inversion - eg invert two first consonants in a word and say the word. Very complex!!
• Irregular words - said, yacht, knight etc. You can't use phoneme code you need to know these words. Have to use direct access path. Typical mistakes are regulatisation.
• Pseudo words - invented words. Can only be read by phonological decoding route.
• If they can read pseudo words better than irregular words then you know that phonological decoding is working quite well. Direct access route not so good. Errors include lexicalisation - eg labbit - rabbit (overuse of direct access path); addition/omission/ inversion.
• IF they are reading irregular words well and pseudo words poorly then you know direct access route is working well but phonological decoding route is not.
• Text comprehension - find suitable text. Evaluate comprehension. Assess child' background knowledge of the topic of the text:
        
1. What do you know about the subject?
2. What do you think the text is going to be about?
• Gives you an idea of their knowledge before they read.
• Present the text. They read text aloud. Have two copies of text so you can record errors and if possible, record them. 
• Assess their comprehension. Either recall task - get child to tell what the text was about eg describe it to someone who hasn't read the story (look for sequence, central idea, details, basic structure, precise, omissions). Explicit and implicit questions about the text.
• Assess strategy used for completing information. Present text again to child and ask questions that were not correctly answered and analyse the strategy they use to find the answer in the text.
• Analyse mistakes in reading. Positive errors - omissions, insertions, changes in sequence, inattention to punctuation, repetition of part of a word, self correction where meaning is not changed. Negative errors - omissions, insertions, changes in sequence, inattention to punctuation, repetition of part of a word, refusal to read a word where the meaning is altered.
• Using the results - stimulate positive strategies eg link more to prior knowledge, pay more attention to punctuation, improve decoding strategies, encourage self correction. Guide child away from strategies that are being over used eg relying on context to guess a word.
• Assessing sequencing abilities - dyslexics find thing like alphabet, months of year, multiplcation tables etc hard. Design a test - name months of the year. for older children - what letter comes before "p"?
• Rapid automatised naming - name as quickly as possible and without mistakes. Dyslexics are much slower at this. Uses pictures - don't put learner in a situation where they "fail".
• Auditory short term memory - digit span test. Keep increasing until the child makes two mistakes in a row. Then you stop. Do the test again and ask child to repeat in reverse order. In primary school, digit span forward is usually 4-5, backward 2-3. Dyslexic usually much lower.
• Visual short term memory - copying test. Copy text as quickly as possible (eg in 2 minutes). Stress mean dyslexic learners will make mistakes.
• Finding shapes - bell test. How many do they find? What strategy do they use? Dyslexic usually more erratic.
• Sequence comparison - series of letters - are they the same? 

What Can you Do with Test Results?

• If child has difficulty in phonemic awareness and difficulty with pseudo words - design a programe to enhance phonemic awareness and improving the phonological route.
• Child has greater difficulty reading irregular words and much better short term memory for visual rather than auditory materials. Teach irregular words with flashcards.

Kupu o te Wiki - Tāwhirimātea

Ngä tohu a Täwhirimätea.

PS: my apologies for the illustration!