DYSLEXIA UNPACKED

STATEMENT ON DYSLEXIA
We believe the use of the term DYSLEXIA is not helpful as it so broadly used and education experts have major disagreements over the exact meaning.
We DO believe that some children of normal to high intelligence levels experience difficulties with literacy development. I.e. they have problems with reading and writing.
We have helped thousands of these children to improve literacy levels and have noticed they usually present with 5 or more of these particular indicators:
 Avoidance of reading and writing
 Procrastination of homework and all literacy oriented tasks
 Poor phonemic awareness
 Difficulties learning phonics.
 Global, visual learning styles.
 Often well developed art skills.
 Poor self-esteem
 Poor handwriting
 Difficulty blending sounds as they read and write
 Often have trouble with rhyming skills
 Difficulty with eye tracking, convergence and focus
 Perform better when text is enlarged
 Often left handed or a little mixed up about handedness
 Difficulty with midline skills.
 Often talented with maths-especially when only oral responses are needed. As soon as written problems are given, these children lose confidence!
 Poor fine-motor and gross motor skills
 Poor auditory discrimination and auditory memory skills
 Difficulties with concentration
 Often have a parent who may have experienced similar difficulties
 Family history often has individuals who are unusually creative, entrepreneurial in nature but sometimes very disorganised and somewhat “global” in their approach to time management!
These difficulties vary a great deal from child to child and require careful, testing and monitoring.
Most children can be helped and can reach normal levels of literacy. However, in our experience, boring and monotonous tuition programs that simply repeat information, do not work well for these creative children.
The programs must be mostly in the educational arena (administered by trained educators) rather than emphasising ancillary educational services. It is only in the education arena that results can be properly assessed and translated into an effective remedial program.
They DO require repetition and a very carefully sequenced phonological program that thoroughly trains them for careful decoding skills.
They also need very carefully sequenced reading material and a spelling program based on phonics and sight words.
A program such as Brain Gym is needed to strengthen body-brain connections and encourage smooth midline skills and maximum brain stimulation. This is integrated into the Victoria Carlton approach.
We use our own Victoria Carlton programs at ICE. These programs combine all the above requirements. Her teachers are trained in all these concepts and know exactly how to help each and every child in their care.
The recovery programs can be taken in individual or small group mode and according to our own research, our experience the group mode is slightly more effective.
Victoria offers trains thousands of teachers in Australia and SE Asia in her methods and approaches. Early childhood, Primary, High-school and learning specialists from groups such as SPELD attend her courses and experience excellent results.
Victoria has worked with children with mild to very severe literacy problems for over thirty years. Her personally developed programs and approaches have led to recovery and successful school careers for children who had been consigned to the literacy “scrap-heap”.
She believes that learning should be enjoyable, multisensory in nature and should carefully build the damaged self-esteems of children who have experienced difficulties.
There are many experts, agencies and groups that purport to have the quick “answer” for learning literacy difficulties. (Often very expensive answers)
Unfortunately there are no quick fixes and these children need strong tuition twice a week over 12-18 months to make solid improvements.
The hard work is well worth the effort as strong literacy skills are a pre-requisite to most careers and lead to the wonderful worlds available in books.
Neanderthal cavemen with literacy difficulties would not have been disadvantaged but modern day children ARE!

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