Here’s our final lecture. I hope you enjoyed the course and have useful strategies for your classroom.
Stay in touch and let me know if you have any suggestions for future version of this course!
Here’s a copy of this week’s module in pdf: Module 10.pdf
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES BELOW (not required)
Here’s Carol Dweck in a TED talk talking about the importance of believing that you can improve (growth mindset).
The focus on this module is dyslexia and memory. I hope you’ll learn some helpful information that helps you understand your memory preferences as well!
Here are this module’s slides in pdf: Module 8.pdf
Here are the slides of this week module in pdf: Module 6.pdf
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES BELOW (these are not required)
This second video is a wonderful webinar that Dr. Charlie Haynes (from Massachusetts General Hospital) gave us on writing and dyslexia. There are no assignments this week based on this webinar, but I recommend it to you if you are able to watch. What I especially liked about his presentation is how he recognized that dyslexic writers need more scaffolded work at the sentence level. He also used pictures and class discussions to prime the pump for students to write. This video is also downloadable in case you’d like to save it to refer to later.
This week we’re covering the topic of WORKING MEMORY. If you really understand it, you can really boost the performance of your students in class.
Here’s this week’s slides in pdf: Module Week 5
This week we’re going to take a bird’s eye view of specific dyslexia remediation. Some school districts may have adopted a structured literacy approach for all early elementary school classes, whereas for the majority, it exists for students who have pullout remediation.
The first video provides some examples of programs that provide explicit structured multi sensory remediation. If you’re not familiar with the programs, you can see how rigorous and detailed these structured literacy programs are.
Remember to expand the video using the button that has 4 arrows on it. It’s to the immediate left of the vimeo logo. Let me know if you can’t find the button. Unfortunately, it may be hard to see what’s projected on the board, but I mainly wanted to share this to give you an idea of how intensive the remediation is at the level of word sounds.
Thanks also to Emily from our parallel class at SPU who pointed out that the teacher may have accidentally added the schwa “uh” sound when trying to model the ‘b’ sound. It’s really easy to do – but it can cause confusion with children just learning to read.
The ‘b’ sound is a stop sound which means it should stop quickly rather than sounding like b-uh. If students learn it as “b-uh”, then when they sound out the word ‘book’, it will sound like ‘buh-ook’ rather than ‘book’. To avoid this mistake, check out this link and watch the video as Jessica demonstrates the correct sounds. Another video with correct sound pronunciation and visual mnemonic flashcards can be found here.
When students don’t seem to be able to catch on to reading with typical phonics and balanced literacy instruction in classes, then chances are they need this more rigorous and explicit instruction that will help them become fluent readers, spellers, and writers.
The second video talks about the difference between structured literacy and typical literacy programs like balanced literacy. There is nothing wrong with typical reading programs in general – it’s just that for many dyslexic students, they aren’t enough. If these students are ever to develop a level of automaticity and fluency with their reading, they may need structured literacy – and then the earlier the better.
Read more on this topic here ( structured literacy vs. typical learning practices).
SPU-Week3B.pdf in pdf format.
