Mel Levine speaks about the importance of demystifying learning differences with our students. Without a better understanding of their learning style, many students see themselves as "dumb" or "stupid" when they face repeated disappointment in their own school performance. Demystification is a process that takes the mystery out of deficient mastery at school.
Here is an online video from Brain Pop that may help your students with "dyslexia" better understand their learning disability. It's a tool to add to our "Demystification Toolbox."
(I put dyslexia in quotes because it means different things to different people. It's important for kids to understand that all people learn differently and have different strengths and abilities.)
2 comments:
Hi Karen,
Glad I ran into your blog. I think the more programs out there to help people understand their disability the better. My boyfriend has Dysgraphia, which I think is a milder form of Dyslexia that involves being able to read letters, words and symbols correctly but not being able to write them down correctly after reading them. When he was a young boy his family found out about his condition when he brought home a class assignment that he had written down where every letter and word was written backwards and looked like a mirror image of what it should be. Today, he's doing a lot better and is in college finishing his degree, but I think if he hadn't had his disability identified early on, then it might have caused him a lot more distress and gotten in the way of his education. As an adult I think back to the times I struggled back in school with certain subjects and wonder if I had an undiagnosed version of ADD because teachers often told my mother that I wasn't paying attention to the lessons, wouldn't read the instructions or book reading all the way through before working on an assignment and would become easily distracted in class. I feel that if I had known that my problem focusing on classwork wasn't just a lack of interest like most people wrote it off as but more a disability that I needed to overcome then I might have done better in many of my classes. Thanks for posting information on Brain Pop and other resources for identifying and working to overcome learning disabilities!
K Greenhaw -
Ghotit (www.Ghotit.com) offers unique writing and reading online services for people who suffer from dyslexia, dysgraphia or people who are not native-English speakers. Ghotit’s first service is an online context sensitive spell checker.
What people have to say:
My god I have been look for this for all-my life, help that understands me. I write with a dictionary and thesaurus and some times cant even find the word looking for. I could not hold back the tears from the emotion then when I worked out how helpful this spellchecker will be for me.
• i really like it and i'm so glad i found it!! it will really help with my homework etc and my teachers wont get angry at me annymore!!
• Thank you for contacting us with your product. I tinkered with the spell checker for sometime this morning, entering common mistakes that our dyslexic students (and ADD) students make in spelling. I must say that I am extremely impressed with your product and would certainly like to further evaluate it with our students over the next several weeks.
• that spell checker is SO good, its actually waaay better than microsoft because it tells you the reasen why you are usuing the correct word. i really like it, its really good!!
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