Language Structured: Fill & Download for Free

I took training with the Slingerland Method in Renton, Washington. I believe it is the best for teaching students with a visual, audiory and kinesthetic approach. Parents were thrilled with the results. This methodology is a simultaneous, multisensory, structured approach for teaching language arts to dyslexic students in the classroom. However, I used it with the whole class for fantastic results. “My overarching research focuses on how learning and interacting with the world with our hands has a really significant effect on our cognition,” Dr. James said, “on how writing by hand changes brain function and can change brain development.”Slingerland® Institute for Literacy

My experience was that as a young teacher, information about dyslexia was not really taught in the teacher education program I attended (late 70’s) and I’m assuming this was the case for many years. When I first trained in the Slingerland Approach (the original classroom adaptation of the Orton-Gillingham Approach, designed specifically back in the 1920’s to help those with dyslexia) in 1980, the only research on dyslexic brains occurred with postmortem examinations of the brains of suspected dyslexics. So many people thought dyslexia was not a REAL condition, but just meant that somebody was a poor reader. Thankfully, the functional MRI scans that came about later on prove that the brains of people with dyslexia work differently. Dyslexia is a neurological difference in the brain. It’s also a genetic condition, so is often passed down in families. Please read the book, “Overcoming Dyslexia” by Sally Shaywitz, who was involved with the fMRI studies at Yale University. She has included in her book photos of brain scans showing the differences between the brains of dyslexic and nondyslexic individuals and how they each “light up” differently during scans where the person is reading during the scan.We now know a great deal more about how people with dyslexia learn, and how instruction needs to be provided for optimal learning. Instruction needs to be explicit, simultaneous and multisensory, structured, sequential and direct for those with dyslexia to learn. There needs to be repetition, and students generally learn best by doing. People with dyslexia are generally HIGHLY intelligent, though without the proper instruction, they often feel like they are NOT smart. Without the proper instruction, they often do not work up to their potential, and develop social and emotional issues on top of the learning issues they already have. Dyslexic people make up about 20% of the general population (1 out of 5 people are dyslexic, and this is a spectrum disorder, so some are only mildly affected, some have more moderate dyslexia, and some may be more severely dyslexic). However, the prison population has something like 80%–85% dyslexic individuals! I feel strongly that if we could get the proper instruction in the schools for ALL young children, we could prevent much of the difficulty that dyslexia can cause, both personally and in our society. Children who struggle in school due to dyslexia and not being taught the way their brains learn, often drop out and use their intelligence in ways that does NOT help society.Early intervention is really the key. These are people with GREAT minds, and if their needs are met educationally, they can, and do, go on to achieve great things for our world. Think of Einstein, Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Winston Churchill, Babe Ruth, Henry Ford, Steven Spielberg, Agatha Christie, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo DaVinci, about half a dozen U.S. presidents, John Lennon, Babe Ruth, Richard Branson, and oh, so many, many more. These people are highly intelligent and highly creative. We are only hurting our society by NOT providing our dyslexic children with the instruction they truly need.I have worked with dyslexic students for close to 40 years, and I absolutely love my work. I see the difference proper instruction can make in a child’s life. I actually started in a public school in CA where the teachers all had the proper (additional, intensive) training, and the children were screened for dyslexia (also called “specific language disability”). I frankly was surprised to learn later that the public school where I started my career teaching, was HIGHLY unusual for actually having a magnet program for dyslexic students; most schools that have specialized instruction for these kids are private schools.I now privately teach, but hope that one day soon, the powers that be will decide to spend the money needed to properly train teachers and set up programs in our public schools that will address the needs of this very valuable population of students. Early intervention and proper instruction would be much smarter and better for society than building more prisons for those who were failed educationally.Lots of great information can be found at the website of the International Dyslexia Association (www.ida.org) and also that of Learning Ally, The Slingerland Institute (www.slingerland.org), and organizations such as Decoding Dyslexia, among others.We know so much more about dyslexia and how to teach to help these often very gifted students….now the huge challenge is getting funding to train teachers to provide the appropriate instruction and getting the public schools to provide this to ALL children who could benefit from it.

I'm not sure where this term originated, but it refers to the debate about the best way to teach children to read: whole word language vs. phonics.I became a teacher in 1979 and received specialized training in 1980 to teach children with dyslexia. The teaching approach I have used since then, The Slingerland Approach, uses phonics heavily, and children are taught very directly in a multisensory, structured, sequential, direct manner, from which dyslexic students really benefit. And I should add, MOST ALL students would benefit from the same type of instruction. I have taught hundreds of students in the past 41 years, and have seen startling progress using this teaching approach.I recall in 1985, in California where I then lived and taught, “whole word language" was being touted nationwide as “the newest and best way” to teach reading. My understanding of this is that while whole word language was intended to include the use of phonics, along with learning whole words, phonics often was not actually taught.Now, while some children will learn with any kind of good instruction, dyslexic students really require the direct teaching of phonetic awareness, how to decode words, etc., while still needing to memorize the 15% or so of English words that are not phonetic (cannot be sounded out).Also we need phonics instruction to be able to spell more easily. So the lack of instruction in phonetic awareness affects both reading and spelling.I'm including a picture of the test results of one of my former students, so you can see the huge improvement he made in less than a year's time ( with less than 20 hours of instruction). Granted, all students are different, but this student's progress was quite impressive. :)