Ibu Kucing - The Next Chapter in Learning

I’ve been meaning to write this for some time, and it isn’t going to be quick for me. This is my personal story. It is a much different story than others with dyslexia but perhaps it may help someone else in some way. The more I learn about dyslexia and how the brain works, and looking back to my early years, I suppose there were signs.  My Grandma may have been the first to notice anything.  She was a librarian in a middle school and sometimes I would get to go with her to work and help out in the library.  One time, I don’t remember how old I was, she gave me the task of helping to retrieve books off the shelves. She wrote the call numbers on a slip of paper and sent me to find them. More than once I came back saying the book wasn’t there. After a couple times of going through the shelves with me, she realized I was transposing the numbers and looking in the wrong place.  She spent time with me trying different strategies, covering the numbers with my finger and un...

I love my students. I really do; however sometimes they don’t make the best choices. While other teachers liked to use Kahoot and Booklet to do reviews, I had a couple students who lost their Chromebook privileges. Playing in teams wasn’t the best solution, and I wanted to keep them engaged. So I needed a low-tech review activity and fast. About this time I came across a Bingo game I had made for my kids when we were homeschooling to review Greek letters.  Bingo! Perfect!   So I made up just enough bingo boards for my class, and used our note cards we had been making in class to call out definitions and we reviewed our Latin roots. The kids enjoyed it so much they asked to do it again.     During the review I realized how some of my students were really   visual processors. They kept asking me to repeat what I was saying.   Later in the day I was going to have several of them again for math, so   during planning I made a mul...

As a special education teacher for upper elementary, I work(ed) with students with many different academic challenges. A couple years ago, it seemed I had quite a number who were struggling to read and reluctant to use any word attack skills. We had worked on phonics and applied them to single syllable words, but as soon as a word looked big, they just stopped and waited for help. Over summer break, I had the idea that I would start my language arts class (I had a 4th grade ELA section and a 5th grade ELA section) with a “Word of the Day”. I would select a word they might not be familiar with or a vocabulary word they would soon see in one of their other content classes and we would 1. use syllable division patterns to divide the word, then 2. use phonics to sound it out and finally 3. discuss its meaning. This turned out to be a very successful start to class. I watched as their ability to use taught strategies grew, and they became more confident in using those word attack ...