If We Can Brag a Little Bit...

Here's a truly unsolicited testimonial to The Reading Clinic in Palo Alto:

http://www.neighbor.com/review/Tutoring/The+Reading+Clinic/97

Thanks to Kristin Powell for finding it!

Autism: The Musical

Following five Los Angeles children over the course of six months, director Tricia Regan captures the struggles and triumphs of their family lives and observes how this musical production gives these performers a comfort zone in which they can explore their creative sides.

http://www.autismthemusical.com

Capturing Autistic Experience on Film

Interesting article about an upcoming film that will be shot in Spain and will follow autistic children and their parents through a 500-mile pilgrimage. (Including a young boy from Palo Alto.)

http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_9081380

More about the movie:

http://www.pilgrimsmovie.com/pilgrims/pilgrims.html

Literacy and Personal Experience

I recently came across these words in an article written in 1986, which I think have relevance to our practice of VV today:

"Literacy is the capacity to relate words on the page to personal experience. It is a mysterious filling in. When we read about a mountain, we go beyond dictionary definitions to flesh out the word with our own experience, whether from our senses, our imaginations, or what we have already heard and read. And we read between the lines in the same way, filling in the unstated motive, linking cause with effect. We use our imaginations."
--"Coming to Words: Writing as Process and the Reading of Literature," Gary Lindberg

I think our practice of stimulating our students' ability to visualize can only be strengthened by an awareness of where a person's pictures come from in the first place. By stimulating a student's capacity to visualize text, we are also helping that student access and use what they know already to build new knowledge. We have often noted to one another that VV is limiting when we think that picturing is the only way we process text. We have to help our students see that picturing is the way we connect our personal experience to the words we read.

I wanted to bring up this idea of activating schema and background knowledge because I have seen how it engages our students, how it allows them to have a successful reading. We need more systematized ways to activate schema before we start the process of VV with felts. Pre-visualizing keywords and making predictions have been extremely successful with our VV students in Palo Alto. In short, I advocate making pre-reading (in the sense of making a student aware of their background knowledge) the first step we take with all of our students when doing VV exercises.

Further rationale for systematizing pre-reading is in the needs of our students. Many of our students fall into one of two categories: top-down or bottom-up readers. Top-down readers over-rely on their background knowledge. They take a word or concept from the reading and make associations based on their own experiences. Often these students are described as "off topic" or as lacking focus. Pre-reading allows these students to be self-conscious of the experiences they are tapping into while asking them to respect the text, to acknowledge that it may have a different point of view or new information.

Bottom-up readers conversely over-rely on the text. These are the students who repeat back or memorize the text without processing it. Pre-reading forces these students to tap into their background knowledge, making it more available to them when they read.

In both cases, pre-reading encourages dialogue with the text and the higher order thinking skills we so highly regard. Let's make a conscious effort to learn more about schema theory and share that with our tutors, students and parents.

I have several articles (some more accessible than others) on schema theory. If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to make copies.

Kristin Agius

Teacher Scholarships for Slingerland Training

Dear NCBIDA members and friends,

We are pleased to announce a special opportunity for teachers this summer. The Northern California Branch of The International Dyslexia Association (NCBIDA) will provide partial scholarships for teachers to attend trainings in Slingerland multisensory structured language approaches for reading instruction. These trainings include all the components recommended by the National Reading Panel for regular education teachers, as well as for those working primarily with children with learning disabilities.

Classroom teachers have found these trainings to be instrumental in expanding their knowledge of language structure, including phonics, and they report feeling much more confident about teaching the struggling readers in their classrooms and help them improve their decoding, fluency and spelling. For testimonials from past scholarship recipients, please visit www.dyslexia-ncbida.org/articles/winter06/thoughts_on_slingerland.html.

For more information on the scholarship timeline and upcoming Slingerland classes – and to download an application form – go to www.dyslexia-ncbida.org/scholarships.html.

We would appreciate your help in sharing this news and in encouraging your friends and colleagues to take advantage of this opportunity to improve the effectiveness of their teaching.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Rabalais
NCBIDA Scholarship Committee Chair

Chris Stephen: Featured Tech Innovator

The National Center for Technology Innovation is featuring Read How You Want founder Chris Stephen.

Click here to view the article.

Amazing 17-month-old

Thank to Kristin Powell for telling me about this story. They definitely touch on the importance of multisensory instruction for language acquisition.