Learning to read
This is probably one area of our home ed experience where I've been a bit of an orgo-planner, albeit with sloppy tendencies ;-) Several people have asked me about my experience of helping a dyslexic child to read, and Kirsty wanted some Jolly Phonics info, so I thought I would write this up. With thanks to Hannah for teaching me all I know about this, and for helping me find a patience I didn't know I possessed. She says its OK to tell other people what we did. I'm proud of you, sweetheart :-)
Hannah was a little bright spark, and loved books from when she was months old. Sometime before her third birthday, she worked out that the print was different from the pictures, and used to point to it saying "what's that?" Before she was four, she was demanding to learn to read. As she lived in a house surrounded by books, and was read to for hours every day, I didn't anticipate any problems. I just assumed she would learn by the osmosis method. I was vaguely surprised when she didn't pick it up, but she wasn't yet even school age, having missed the four year old entry by a few days, so I thought that anything she did pick up in the year before school would be a bonus. By the following year, we had decided she wasn't going to school anyway, but I was slightly more concerned that her little friends, one only 17 days older than her, had finished P1, and was reading quite fluently, while Hannah wasn't making any progress, despite her daily cries of wanting to be able to read. She was also starting to complain that the print on a page jiggled about, turned itself upside down, slide over the page, and made her feel sick to look at. A dyslexic screening test (they don't do diagnostic tests till at least 7), showed that she had strong dyslexic traits, and I decided that I was going to have to be rather more proactive. I was also slightly freaked out by the realisation that her dad also seemed to have most of these traits, and remembered reading and writing as a major trial.
We looked at 100 Easy Lessons (how complicated could they make it, was our response to that one), and Reading Reflex (lots of good ideas, but phonically it wasn't quite right for us, as it's an American programme, and highly prescriptive). The authors have guru status, and it was very "one true way". So we settled for Jolly Phonics. A UK system (was even piloted in Scotland), suitable for non-dyslexics as well as dyslexic children. Seemed to have been subject to a fairly robust research programme. It's now easily available in places like ELC, but even four years ago, it had to come from a school supplier.
We pushed the boat out, and bought the box (around £100, IIR). It contained two pupil videos, a facilitators video, a photocopiable facilitators guide, 7 workbooks, seven finger phonic books, stencils, two sets of jiglets, and Inky the puppet :-) All of the bits could be bought separately, but it was cheaper in the long run to buy the set. Hannah loved the videos, but the sloppy pronunciation of the consonants offended me a bit. The crucial thing in a phonics programme IMO, is that you ensure that there is no "uh" on the end of your consonants. Otherwise the simple c/a/t becomes the unrecognisable c/uh/a/t/uh. Not so important if you are doing single letters, but when it comes to blending, a nightmare.
I think my reading around this area underlined two principles for me that I tried to keep at the front of my mind:
1. The letters on the page are a pictorial representation of the sounds in our oral language. So they "stand for" a sound that the child already knows. I explained it to Hannah like this." A long time ago, people didn't bother writing things done much. They lived in small groups ad tribes, and there wasn't really the same need to write messages to each other. Stories were passed on by people telling them to each other. However, gradually they thought it would be useful to have another way, whereby the could leave messages, or record stories for each other, without them actually having to be there to tell them. So initially they used pictures, and as they didn't have paper, they scratched the pictures unto walls, or onto wax tablets, or carved them onto wood. Different parts of the world developed that idea differently, and in this part of the world, people eventually agreed that they would develop a set of symbols or sound pictures, each symbol or sound picture standing for a sound in speech. And as initially only a few people were involved, they agreed to always use the same symbol for a sound. It was like a special code, and gradually that code was shared with other people. So people knew that if they saw a certain symbol written down, then it would stand for a particular sound. If they ran a group of these together it would stand for a word. But then they ran into a problem, because they realised that actually there are 44 different sounds in English, and they had only made up 26 symbols. So rather then make more symbols (or sound pictures), they decided that they would sometimes have to add two (or even three) sound pictures together, to stand for some of the sounds. When they do that, its called a diagraph or trigraph" Now before someone jumps down my throat to say this isn't historically quite accurate, remember a) I was talking to a four year old b) she was MY four your old. Tell yours what you want :-)
2. If I was working from the principle that the written word is only a code, or a pictorial representation of the spoken word, then I needed to show her how language was constructed, before I even thought about reading. So for around three months, we didn't look at the books at all, but twice a day, every day, we would play oral phonics games. I spy is the obvious (and if I spied a whale, I told her the beginning sound was wh, not w.) After that we moved onto word endings. "I spy a thing whose name ends with.....", and word middles "I'm thinking of a furry pet, and the middle sound is aaaa. We then played the game of "how many sounds can you hear in this?" If the word was sun, I would slowly say the sounds, not quite segmenting them, but doing it slowly enough that she could hear them. And also the reverse of that "what word has the sounds s/u/n" in it? Interestingly, when Hannah finally had her diagnostic test, the EP said she was confused - while clearly she had a range of dyslexic type difficulties, she did not have the most common one - the inability to detect the sounds in words. I'm not saying for one minute that this type of intervention is necessary or appropriate for all children, but I think it is a crucial component if for whatever reason a phonics approach to reading is used.
After about three months of oral blending and segmenting, I introduced the Finger Phonic books. These are board type books, and they each cover a group of letter. In the first one, the letters s,a,t,p,i,n are taught. These six sounds will enable the child to build a fairly wide range of words. What I like about this is that it is a multi-sensory approach. The letter is written clearly, and the child can see it used indifferent positions in a range of words. There is a letter cut-out for them to trace with their finger. And finally, they learn a whole body movement associated with that sound picture. Every day, you cover one sound, the child learns the sound that the letter symbol stands for, the action associated with it, and then cuts out a pre drawn letter symbol, and sticks it in their sound book. Every day, we did one new letter, and a quick revision of the sound book. By the end of book one, we could play a range of blending and segmenting games on paper, rather than orally, and we also did silent actions, where one of us would "sound out" a word using only the actions, and the other would read it from their movements.
I tried very hard never to confuse the issue by saying to her "what does that say?" Clearly it said nothing. It was a silent mark on a page. I would say to her "what sound do WE say when we see that sound picture or symbol". Or alternatively "what sound does that symbol stand for?"
The workbooks weren't used till much later. They are the bit I think are probably least useful in the overall programme, although I think people who aren't using the JP programme, but just want something for writing practice often use them. But we left that "writing" component out at that point. I think they are intended to be used in tandem, but for Hannah it was too much, too soon. We did them at a later date, as a separate activity. She did however enjoy the writing stencils, and used the jiglets lot for blending. They were stuck on the fridge door, and every night, we'd separate them, and in the morning, she would put them back together.
I made two sets of sound cards, and we would play pairs and sound snap, or I would give her the cards for p/i/n, and asked her to arrange them into the word pin. And so on :-)
During this time, we of course continued to read to her every day, plus she had access to a vast range of books on tape. For reading, we used whatever she fancied, though I would often shorten the text, type it in Sassoon font, in a 16 pt size, and blue tac it over the existing text, so that she had reading success, by her definition.
As she got confidence, we would do paired reading, where we would sit together, and read aloud at the same time. When she wanted to try by herself, she would tap my hand, and I would stop, and then when she wanted me to come in again, she would tap again, and I would read along side her. Reading plays was successful at this point. I re-wrote some of her favourite books : Farmer Duck, Pig in the Pond, Three Bears etc, as plays, ensuring that the role she had would have easy text.
Last year we felt she needed another boost, and we worked through a programme from the dyslexia institute with her. It was the most deadly boring experience of my life. It defeats me what people think of a child's intelligence, that they can make the boring fun and exciting by the addition of a few crappy cartoons.
Anyway, that is our experience. I don't intend it as a how to guide, but hope it's helpful or interesting for someone. If I was only going to have a few items from the JP range, I would borrow the videos, if I could, and buy a set of finger phonic books. Workbooks I would manage without. I liked having the facilitators guide, but it would be possible to get by without it. I really wish I had a child who just absorbed reading. But I didn't. Hannah has learned to read by a painstaking process of learning sound by sound. She is in the minority by having that need. But it does worry me a bit when someone asks for reading help, and is met with a litany of "just read to her" and "she'll read when she is ready". For some kids its just not like that. I believe I could have read Hannah the entire library, and she would not have cracked it - she needed that step by step breakdown. For the last year, she has had a perfectly adequate level of functional literacy, but I had almost stopped hoping that she would read for pleasure. She read simply because she needed to sometimes, but if she could find another way, she would. Occasionally she would read something, but I always got the feeling it was something she tolerated. But after this last bought of reading intervention from us, she has suddenly taken off. Over the last few weeks, she has been reading two or three books a week. The breakthrough came when she tackled the new Jacqueline Wilson book "Best Friends". We were driving to York last week and she said "thank you so much for helping me to learn to read. I used to hate it, and it was so hard, but now its as easy as breathing " Brought a tear to a glass eye :-)
The next step for us is writing - Hannah has the typical disorganised dyslexic thought processes, so we are also trying to help her develop a tool box of tricks that work for her, to help her gather her thoughts together. And maybe it's only a bit of self justification, but I'm not at all sure Hannah would have been at this point had she been in school. Dyslexic children often end up with their self esteem in tatters, and a belief that they are stupid because they can't do this thing that everyone else can. She hasn't met that - she is pissed off by it sometimes, but I think she does just believe that her brain works in a slightly different way, and it's not really a big deal.
