A child with dyslexia can become very proficient using a laptop as the multi-sensory nature of working in this way is very supportive. Sometimes a child will be given a school laptop to use in lessons which is great. What is not great is the fact that so often these laptops are not charged up. They may have different settings or they are not up to date with software etc. So this is an area which needs better attention, as if a laptop is more beneficial for a child with dyslexia it should be used. Each laptop should be personal to the child, so settings of font, size, background colour etc can be made and set up just once and not be continually changed. This negates the need to spend the first ten minutes of the lesson getting the equipment ready before any actual work can be done.
Alongside the laptop, training should be given in the use of software and in a basic course of touch typing. This can be a very effective way of recording for a child with dyslexia. It also works out cheaper for the school, as a scribe may not be needed to record for the child. In some cases of severe dyslexia a scribe is most definitely needed. A scribe is a trained adult who works alongside a child with dyslexia and writes for them. They do not do the work for the child, they do though write down everything a child wants to say. It can take a while to become proficient at this for both the child and the scribe so if this is going to be considered as a way of recording in a formal exam, it needs to start as soon as possible, the earlier the better. It needs to become the child’s normal way of working and become a very natural thing for a child to do. It takes time to build up fluidity and the best results come from a good relationship between child and adult.
It may also be that ‘voice to text’ may be a good option to use and this can be very helpful when doing homework. This is where the child with dyslexia can speak their thoughts and the laptop will type it out for them.
In my whole career I feel I have only ever really taught two children with severe dyslexia. The children were both boys, both highly intelligent, both highly articulate with an excellent mature and wide ranging vocabulary, both with amazing knowledge of specific areas of interest along with both having an excellent breadth of general knowledge. These children would be so dreadfully disadvantaged and their needs completely disregarded if they were not given a scribe to work with.
Imagine them sitting a formal GCSE exam which involved writing and not being able to write, despite a mind absolutely brimming over with perfectly acceptable and appropriate ideas, more than a couple of sentences. Their writing would be messy often illegible, their spelling would be incredibly poor and the amount of actual writing would be so minimal it may even not be graded. This would be criminal and a complete injustice would occur which simply should never be allowed to happen. I wonder if I would have fared a little better with the use of a scribe for my exams, an interesting thought but not one I will dwell on as life is far too short.
So these metacognitive needs in all children but in particularly the child with dyslexia should never be underestimated. The very real impact of fully addressing them should be clearly measurable for the child as a very positive thing making a great deal of difference. If a child with dyslexia knows that their needs are going to be met or at the very least be made aware of, then their confidence will surely rise and their anxieties about a move to a new school be lessoned. The pre attendance visit also allows the child to gain some initial confidence at moving around the building, getting to know a little of their way around.
The secondary school is going to be bigger than the primary school, in some case a great deal bigger. Remember the needs for those with co-occurring difficulties such as dyspraxia or general clumsiness of a child with dyslexia. The need to navigate direction can also be hard, often a child with dyslexia will mix up and not remember the basic direction of left and right. In addition to this, the learning and remembering of instructions can be extremely hard. All this needs time and thought and should be given attention in the preparation stages of any school transition.
Think of a child coming from a small village primary school to a large secondary school with two floors and 7 more year groups from year 7 to year 13. The differences can be huge. Larger rooms, corridors, steps, separate buildings etc. Some children do not turn 11 until the summer holidays before transition so they are very young indeed and they suddenly need to navigate the maze of a new building and the expectation is that they do this quickly, independently and with no fuss made.
I was summer born child of course, at the end of June and it is said that children born in summer months are at a disadvantage. A child born in July will be in the same year group as a child born in the previous September but there will be almost a year difference in their ages. The trouble here is that both children will be expected to reach the same standard of education by the end of the school year. Yes, a child born in the summer is clearly disadvantaged. Maybe it would be a little fairer to group children born between the beginning of August to the end of July as this would give in effect more time before beginning school, all be it just a couple of months.
The fact that each subject will now be taught in a different room in the school rather than the child just needing to know their own classroom in which almost all lessons take place in their primary school can give rise to some real anxiety. Spatial awareness, a sense of direction, knowing left from right, knowing prepositions such as next to, between, behind, in front, to the side of, can all be challenging for the child with dyslexia.
So reasonable adjustments may be needed to allow for an opportunity for the child to succeed. Maybe a child with dyslexia initially leaves the class a couple of minutes earlier so as to navigate the school without crowds of other children. Maybe they have a buddy to support them in this. There also needs to be the opportunity to over-learn and to re-visit work if it is not grasped the first time it is taught. Children with dyslexia need this opportunity as they try to remember and recall their learning. Without this, learning can simply be lost and forgotten.
The learning and taking in of new information can be very overwhelming for children with dyslexia so the over-learning and re-visiting of work previously taught is vital. Processing new information whether it has been given verbally or visually can take time to be understood and comprehended. The recalling of this information can also take time and can so easily be lost very quickly, falling away from the mind as the cognition in dyslexic learners can be slower than a non-dyslexic.
Just knowing that work will be re-visited is so helpful as it does take at least some of the pressure off the need to fully remember every detail of what has been taught. This pressure is very real and can be really quite debilitating as the child with dyslexia really does not always take in what is being said. They simply spend their time in school worrying that they need to try to remember everything that is said and shown to them which can result in them taking in and remembering very little at all.
Sadly however, there is little time for the over learning and re-visiting of teaching in our busy, unbalanced and overloaded curriculums. Teaching happens at such a pace as there is only so much time to get through a topic with no time for the child with dyslexia to consolidate their learning. There is also little time for the application of their learning of any new knowledge. There is little time to practise and rehearse before trying to apply what has been learnt. This application of learning may also be expected to be independent learning. This of course then adds further pressure and so can be quite stressful and overwhelming for a child with dyslexia as they may not have grasped and remembered the information and teaching first time round. The trouble is that if first steps and foundations are not fully grasped, remembered, consolidated and practised, further steps of learning will be futile. There will surely be nothing to add onto, nothing to further extend and develop as the vital first steps are not secure and there is no time to go over and make sure they can be secured before moving on.
This is a huge disadvantage for a child with dyslexia. They are so often wrongly thought of as ‘just not getting it’. However, if they had more time and more opportunity to practice and apply their learning then they may then be able to show what they can do and feel some success which is so very important in the building of confidence and self-esteem in our young learners. This needs to happen before moving onto the learning of yet more new information. The Singapore maths example of the use of the concrete, followed by the pictorial and finally the abstract is surely beneficial in my opinion. The child with dyslexia needs to experience physically before seeing work in picture format and then finally a more abstract representation. So often we skip or move far too quickly through these steps leaving young children with dyslexia behind. Of course once gaps are there, it is very hard to get them filled. Some children with dyslexia have access to and engage in intervention programmes in primary school or catch up programmes in secondary school. These interventions are largely given for reading, phonics or spelling, some work may also be available for maths.
