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Every child or young person I have worked with has obstacles in their path to learning. Every parent has struggled during homework sessions; tried teaching/ lecturing/ cajoling their child themselves; engaged other tutors; sat with the nursery or class teacher or SENDCo to hear their child is not keeping up.
We now know that dyslexia and literacy difficulties are fundamentally speech (phonological) or language processing differences. Brains can be wired differently. The brain is not hard-wired to read, write and spell. Over many years of assessing young people, I have seen two divergent patterns: learners who can ‘surface read’ fluently and spell with ease, but do not understand the language they have read- this is language delay. Then there are learners who struggle greatly with phonics, leading to reading decoding and spelling problems, but who have great understanding. This is dyslexia. Learners with dyslexia or a language delay prove challenging to support in mainstream schools with access to mainstream funding and resources. This is because learners with dyslexia and/or language difficulties are not ‘mainstream’ and usually do not respond to conventional, ‘one size fits all’ teaching.
So I, and my small team of trusted professionals at Adventures in… are deliberately unconventional!
If a child or young person has a literacy or language difficulty, you can’t just tell them what to do. At Adventures…,we show them how to do it and guide them in doing it enough times so that they can do it for themselves.
Our approach teaches templates, formulae, processes and strategies, before, during and after a piece of work. This method of thinking is hugely valuable to children with language and/or literacy difficulties and opens up the world of reading and writing for young and older learners.
We teach 4 fundamental elements: vocabulary, grammar, spelling strategies and natural punctuation with these 4 elements, solidly learned, every child can learn to speak, read and write proficiently.
It sounds simple, but it has taken my whole working life to perfect.
