PARENT’S PAGES - TEACHING SOLUTIONS
“When a dyslexic understands how they think and what information they need to learn a new task it is like finally getting the pieces of a puzzle to fit.”
How the Right Brain Learns
“A right-brained individual learns by processing and retaining information in whole concrete images.”
Step One:
The Turner Hope approach to teaching the dyslexic student begins with accepting that the right brain thinks in whole pictures, images and concepts as described under Seven Major Causes of Dyslexia. It is necessary to understand that letters and numbers on their own are very abstract and represent nothing to the right brain. This is not a disability, but a learning difference. Also, arithmetic and most of the words in our language are abstract.
Step Two:
Dyslexic students must be taught the appropriate skills for learning to print, spell, read, write sentence answers and work with arithmetic and mathematical concepts. These enable the right brain to change whole concrete images into the words and numbers the left brain understands. Most dyslexic learning problems arise from the student having the wrong skills to print, spell, read and write. For example, learning to spell words as they hear them (phonetically) they will spell most words incorrectly rather then use their traditional spelling. As a result they lose most of the decoding information that gives meaning and recognition to the words while reading which destroys comprehension.
Step Three:
To make the changes from concrete images of information in the right brain into words and numbers the left brain understands, they must be taught their learning skills in complete, structural wholes. A few of these problems and their solutions are listed below. A full coverage of dyslexic learning problems, their causes and solutions can be found in the manual How the Right Brain Learns. Click on Bookstore or on E-lessons for teaching instructions and exercises.
Seven Basic Learning Solutions
- To print out answers or exercises, the right brain requires lessons in how to use the space on a page to suit the assignment and how to print the letters correctly.
- To learn to spell a word, the right brain must receive a drawn or printed image of the whole word, not separate parts nor their phonetic sounds.
- To understand and remember a lesson, it must be taught at one sitting. If not the brain will not understand what was taught and discard it, so that it is totally forgotten the next day.
- To read fluently and with comprehension, the brain must have a whole decoded reading vocabulary to match the level of difficulty of the material to be read. Reading with understanding cannot be done if the student must first decode the majority of the words in a passage.
- To compose sentences that are grammatically correct, the student must be taught the parts of speech and the sequence they follow in the English language. Sequence of words and ideas are key to good style and organization of sentences and paragraphs
- To complete an assignment that is to be marked by the teacher requires a complete set of instructions of how they are to carry out the assignment at every stage. For example they need to know everything from when to start, when to hand it in, where to write their name, whether to use pencil or pen, etc. (See The Five Steps to Learning).
- To work with mathematical word problems which are very abstract, drawings of word problems should be provided the students so that they can visualize what the letters and numbers represent and calculators to do the arithmetic that cannot be visualized.
|
