July 8th reading: Reading Disabilities & The Education of Dyslexic Children from Childhood to Young Adulthood

David Sousa’s article opens by questioning if students are ready for reading instruction in kindergarten. I would argue that kindergarten is a time for fostering a love of learning more so than drill and kill lessons. Young students creativity should be fostered during this time, free unstructured play time should be a part of every day. Children in Finland start school at age seven, have longer recess and lunch breaks, and shorter days yet they quickly catch up academically to students from other geographical areas who begin school as young as age four. 

 

Page by Spencer Kornhaber - What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

I think some parents may rush to get their kids into school because they think it’s best, and because they fear societal judgement. I find it difficult to have much of a stance since I’m not a parent myself- but seeing grade one classes, I can tell you the kids seem young, really young. It makes sense to me that they should be playing and enjoying life rather than starting in the education system so early. I encourage educational practices with all kids, but maybe not so structured and classroom based so young. Reading exposure is encouraged, but its difficult to expect young children to catch on quickly.

As Sousa states in the article, no single part of our brain is dedicated to reading, it’s not a survival skill, it doesn’t come naturally. Even the terminology of the aspects of reading sound complicated: decoding, comprehension, phonemic awareness, phonemes and graphemes. 

Further, three neural systems must come together to read successfully. 

Taken from David Sousa’s article

All of these components seem complicated for the strongest students in the best of societal circumstances. These difficulties in reading typically increase for minority groups, or those in low socioeconomic settings as a result of a lack of teacher training, large classes and a lack of parental support. English language learners who speak other languages struggle as well. Difficulties reading are compounded further if the student has a differently built brain, working memory issues, genetics and gender all come into play too.

Regarding dyslexia, the brain works differently thus reading and writing can be difficult. Check out this video to see what it may be like for some people with dyslexia:

 My fiancé has dyslexia and I asked her to tell me about it while I was reading this article. She said it’s frustrating. She needs to go slowly with math, double checking number and it’s the same with reading, and she switches words on occasion. She doesn’t read phonetically, she reads by memorization and self corrects if the word selected doesn’t make sense. She wasn’t aware of her dyslexia until she was 22 when one of her math instructors in the military was grading an assignment, noted she had a lot of her numerical answers backwards, and wrote “dyslexia?” on her paper.

Sousa’s article made me realize just how difficult reading is to learn, and how easy that is to forget for me, since I enjoy reading and never struggled with it. Reading is difficult to learn, and to teach. I will be more aware of this moving forward. 

Today in class- We finished off our app smash project today! Yeehaw! We enjoyed using all the apps, and found that the best way to learn how to use them was to a combination of just opening and clicking, trying different things, while also opening up a google search on the laptop. It was sometimes frustrating when the technology glitched or was slow to load, but overall, it worked well. I enjoyed the ipad movie at the beginning, it really helped me understand disruptive technologies.