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Newsletter Archives, click here)
THE DYSLEXIA
SOLUTION
Volume 3 #9 July/August
2004
NEWSLETTER
As my readers all know, I always recommend that a parent
NOT teach the RfS program. If it is humanly possible, get
a pleasant , intelligent grandma,
grandpa or college coed who is an excellent reader to do the job. The reason
for this is obvious-- there’s just too much emotional baggage between
a “failing” child and a distraught parent for the parent to be
as relaxed as a tutor. A less obvious reason is that since dyslexia is inherited,
you often find that the parent who wants desperately for her child not to
go through what she did, as a dyslectic student, will undertake to do the
teaching. But you can’t have the blind leading the blind, and someone who is not
a good reader simply cannot do the job right, however well meaning. So aren’t
you better off getting an experienced reading teacher to do the tutoring? Very
rarely. One reason is that a successful elementary school teacher already “knows
how to teach reading” and doesn’t want to be told to follow a method
she has never tried and which is very scripted. Teachers hate scripted programs,
arguing that kids differ and one method just doesn’t suit everybody.
The argument is fine as long as you are merely talking
about teaching some subject to a bunch of kids. But RfS is
NOT just a reading program. It is
a therapeutic series of exercises to straighten out the wiring problem
in the
brain that is causing the inability to learn to read. Not to read. To LEARN
to read. As my mother used to say, that is a gray horse of another color.
This means that you must apply the treatment according to the directions,
as in
any therapy designed to eliminate the cause of a problem .
If your child had pneumonia and the doctor told you to
give him penicillin in a certain way for a certain time,
that’s what you would do. You wouldn’t
decide that maybe you should give him half the dose for twice the time, or
maybe add a little of Junior’s recent medicine that helped his
cough, or finish up that prescription that a neighbor gave you from when
her child
was sick.
This is not to say that no teacher should be teaching RfS.
Gym, art, music and foreign language teachers are often excellent.
They like kids,
never
taught reading before and are glad to be told how to go about it.
Teaching tip:
Don’t give tests, quizzes, “pop” quizzes,
grades or marks. This is hard for the school administration
to swallow, so more on it in the next newsletter.
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Archives (2001 files in .doc format):
|
April 2004 - Vol.
3 #6 |
November
2002 - Vol. 2, #3 |
March 2004 - Vol.
3 #5 |
October
2002 - Vol. 2, #2 |
February 2004 - Vol.
3, #4 |
September
2002 - Vol. 2, #1 |
December 2003 - Vol.
3, #3 |
August
2002 - Vol. 1, #11 |
October/November
2003 - Vol. 3, #2 |
July
2002 - Vol. 1, #10 |
September
2003 - Vol. 3, #1 |
May
2002 - Vol. 1, #9 |
August
2003 - Vol 2, # 12 |
March
2002 - Vol. 1, #8 |
July
2003 - Vol. 2, #11 |
February
2002 - Vol. 1, #7 |
June
2003 - Vol. 2, #10 |
January
2002 - Vol. 1, #6 |
May
2003 - Vol. 2, #9 |
December
2001 - Vol. 1, #5 |
April
2003 - Vol. 2, #8 |
November
2001 - Vol. 1, #4 |
March
2003 - Vol. 2 #7 |
October
2001 - Vol. 1, #3 |
January
2003 - Vol. 2, #5 |
September
2001 - Vol. 1, #2 |
December
2002 - Vol. 2, #4 |
August
2001 - Vol. 1, #1 |
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