Dyslexia Bits: Discussion About Literacy & Learning

So I'm talking about literacy and learning. Literacy is fascinating because vast majority of children, over 50%, learn to read with relative ease. As we go down the scale of learning, and it's the scale of language challenges that limits children, we as teachers have to be far more aware of what is required to teach our children to read. Now again, here's the challenge. Some will pick up learning just by teaching decoding. I have specialised in teaching children who sit in the lowest 10th and even 5th percentile of language challenges. And what that does is makes me aware of many challenges that most teachers are not aware of. Because when you're teaching children who sit on the 1st and the 2nd percentile of language development, we as teachers cannot get one or two things right. We have to have every component of literacy learning correct to have these children be successful. And this week I've been reading the book How We Learn by Stanislas, and I cannot even pronounce his last name, but he has done TED Talks on learning and literacy. And one of the first things he says is we have to understand how children see the world. Our learning or our teaching has to be child-centered education. Second part is children need to see value and purpose in our learning, in their learning. Why am I doing this? What's in it for me? And when we start to work from that point of view, child-centered and value. We're dealing also with memory for children. I haven't even talked about literacy because these are the components that are required before we even start to teach literacy. So value and purpose, and what does he say? Active engagement. Active engagement in learning is Critical. How do we know a child is actively engaged? That's a difficult one, but are they just repeating what we're saying? We have to check out their body language, their response, their thinking. There's no measure of is the child actively engaged, and we can't do a simple test to see if the child is actively engaged, but active engagement is critical. And finally, what does he talk about? He talks about sleep. He says when we sleep, we are— we allow the brain to put together all the learning that has happened during that day in a sequence and shift it from short-term memory to long-term memory. So all of these components start before we even talk about how we are teaching or what we are teaching our children to read. They are not optional extras. They are fundamental to learning to read. And my story, the book Reversed: A Memoir, Gives the foundation of my son Nicholas's learning, which happened so long ago, and I unwittingly did all these things for a child who they described as the worst child I'd seen in 20 years of teaching. The expectation for my son at age 6 from people was zero. So to teach him required ticking all the boxes of purpose and value, engagement, and shifting memory from short-term to long-term during sleep. Connect with me. I'm Lois Letchford. I'm the author of the book Reversed to Memoir, and I'm a literacy problem solver. Thank you.