Author Maryanne Wolf believes that struggling readers can be identified in kindergarten and first grade. She recommends using letter-sound correspondence and decoding measures to find those who have difficulty with phonology (hearing, segmenting, and understanding that small units of sounds make up words). To diagnose those with naming-speed deficits, she suggests tasks in which the child names rows of repeated letters, numbers, colors, or objects as fast as possible. Of course there are those who have vocabulary challenges due to literate-poor environments, and those who have second-language or dialect issues who can also be diagnosed in these early school years.
Teachers "with a toolbox of principles that can be applied to different types of children" are needed to help struggling readers know as much about a word as possible, while having as much fun as possible! Our most important job is to make sure we don't miss the potential of any child.
Let's consider the gifts dyslexics have given to our society. What would our world be like without Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Charles Schwab, Andy Warhol, Picasso, Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, and Patrick Dempsey? Would we have enjoyed, "Pirates of the Caribbean", without Keira Knightly and Johnny Depp? Notice the amount of creativity and "thinking outside the box" this list entails.
Which begs the $64,000 question: (Similar to, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?") "Is the brain of a person with dyslexia forced to use the right hemisphere because of problems in the left hemisphere, thereby strengthening all the right-hemispheric connections and developing sometimes unique strategies for doing all kinds of things? Or are the right-hemisphere connections more dominant and creative from the start, therefore taking over activities such as reading?" (p. 200) One of the best theories from the book is that when structures in the right hemisphere are put in charge of precise, time-based functions for reading that are normally found in the left hemisphere, it inevitably leads to difficulties . . . in a literate society.
I'll end with one of my favorite characters from this year's read aloud -- Percy Jackson. He was a struggling reader who hated school. Yet when the author, Rick Riordan, takes him out of the academic setting, every deficit becomes a strength.
This is how Annabeth explains it:
"The letters float off the page when you read, right? That's because your mind is hard-wired for ancient Greek . . . . And the A.D.H.D. -- you're impulsive, can't sit still in the classroom. That's your battlefield reflexes. In a real fight, they'd keep you alive. As for the attention problems, that's because you see too much, Percy, not too little. Your senses are better than a regular mortal's . . . . Face it. You're a half-blood." -- Rick Riordan
No comments:
Post a Comment