I dictated 20 words, basically finger spell the words i.e. /k/ /a/ /n/ for can, the dictation process is to help children learn to associate the sounds and their symbols, train their ears to listen, and think to spell, instead of memorizing the whole word as an entire picture.
Compare the work of a 12 years old and a 6 years old.
Joel is 12. Noor is 6.
Noor came to me 4 months ago, have been attending kindie for 2 years, couldn’t read a word in English, couldn’t understand my instruction in English. I had to talk to her in Malay to stop her from crying. For a 6 years old, she did pretty well in this dictation, didn’t she?
Joel joined in last month, his English teacher complaint that he couldn’t spell “fish” and scolded him for being lazy. He has very short attention span, wondering eyes and low self-esteem, failed most subjects in school regularly. I suspect he may have attention problem or learning difficulty or could be just have poor instruction from his kindie years. I gave him a diagnostic test when he joined, he scored 1 word out of 50 words, the score just indicated that he couldn’t spell at all. He probably has poor visual memory and couldn’t store much images of whole words in his long term memory. I have no doubt he would have trouble reading a las vegas strip map as an adult without remedial work.
After joining the class 5 times, he knew the sounds of phonograms A-Z and a couple of the multi -letter phonograms. Though he mixed up the vowels a lot and is still developing his instant association of sounds and symbols.
In today’s dictation, even though I gave him the clue that /p/ /e/ /t/, the /e/ is the first sound of /e/ /E/ (letter e), he still wrote down /p//a//t/. He is going to be challenging, but also the kind of student that need much help to learn to spell and read. I am not so optomistic his parents will be patient to see him building proper foundation and improve from there though.
It’s very sad to see parents placing more emphasis on exams/tests and UPSR than the fact that their 12 years old couldn’t spell, read nor write. I have a couple of kids like this last year, just when they started to get a hang of things and started to “get it” after 5-6 months, their parents pulled them out of the SWR class, because their test scores in school hadn’t improved.
Another girl I had, she came to me at the end of her kindie year, couldn’t read nor spell after staying in the same kindie 8 a.m - 6 p.m since she was 2 1/2 years old. She obviously has attention problem and couldn’t sit still, she showed a lot of reversal problem i.e would write top as pot, map as pam.
Nevertheless, she is a very intelligent girl, she knew all the letter sounds of A to Z within 4 weeks, I only spent 10-15 minutes doing lesson with her every week because she just refused to stay on her chair after the 10-15 minutes, so I let her play with the practical life activities I have.
After 3 months, she just told her mother than she thought she could read the sentences we had for dictation. Her mother must have been doubtful, so she wanted to show off to her mother by reading the sentences I wrote on the white board when she came to pick her up. Her mother was really impressed. Her mother also told me that school had aways been a drag but she was a little puzzled what did I do with her daughter that make her so eager to come to my class and was always reminding her in the morning though our session didn’t start till evening.
Of course I skipped the part that her daughter was “playing” for 45 minutes and only had lessons for 15 minutes.:-)
Actually, the girl’s concentration has improved a lot as her self esteem was boosted and for the first time, words make sense! Then, she started year 1. So her mother decided to quit this not so relevant class because she wanted to send her to a couple of other tuition classes and time runs out. I felt sad, but there is really nothing I can do to convince these parents that basic skills like spelling and reading are more important than doing the same question 101 ways so that they can score in their tests.
However, make sure he finds a sport he’s really interested in because learning the rules, taking turns, and cooperating with other kids can be difficult.