2019 Inquiry

This year Toni our AP went to a PD session with Betsy Sewell. From having two dyslexic children of her own Betsy developed a programme 'Agility With Sound' for helping other children who have had difficulty with learning to read and write.

She explains how reading and writing is a relatively recent development for human brains which means that there is not a specific area designated in the brain for this. Most able English readers and writers use the part of their brain used for speech and sound, but often people who have difficulty learning to read and write use the visual part of their brain instead. The programme she has developed has a strong phonics base and helps to reestablish the pathways in the learner's brain back to using the speech/language area.




Children can surprisingly become relatively adept at using the visual side of their brain for literacy up to a certain level but will struggle as the texts become more difficult. In addition the demand on their brains is much greater trying to decipher text using the visual side, so this in turn compromises their ability to focus also on the comprehension of the text.

We had Betsy come to Pt England to give a quick overview of her programme. What she said really resonated so we have decided to try it with some of our year 5/6 students.

INQUIRY FOCUS
 I have decided to focus  my inquiry on seeing what shift in reading and writing we can get from a group of children who are reading and writing well below their chronological age using the Agility With Sound literacy programme.

PRETEST
The initial part of programme involves testing each child individually using a couple of specifically designed tests.  The first one is a spelling test where the child is at a whiteboard. You, as the recorder note down each attempt at spelling the word including changes they make. (This is key in helping to get an understanding of how the child is processing the information - what part of their brain they are using) It clearly highlights gaps or misconceptions in the child's phonological understanding, and also what they do know.
I found this test really eyeopening. To see these children really struggle with trying to spell even basic 3 letter words. To see them knowing that what they had written didn't 'look' quite right so added in a random letter to change that 'look' rather than listening for specific sounds.
Here are two examples.




The second part of the testing is a timed minute test seeing how many words they can read. These words are not high frequency words, rather words that are made up of the basic standard letter sounds. Starting with consonant-vowel-consonant, then adding in blends and multisyllabic.
The test shows how quick they are at processing letter/sounds and also highlights the misconceptions they have.

The final test is another spelling test where the words are made up words.

This programme has similarities to a few things I was trying to do in 2016 when I was taking some children for withdrawal literacy lessons. I had the realisation that the children in these groups had really poor grapho/phonic knowledge and their speed at processing and decoding was really slow and inaccurate. I had searched for activities people used for dyslexic children and came across a similar process which I used daily and felt made a difference.

I am really excited to be trialling Betsy's programme as it seems very specific and targeted. Although I don't think it is a programme you would teach everyone how to read and write I think there are components that complement our Gwyneth Phillips literacy really well which could possibly help avoid having so many children not connecting with the crucial side of their brain for so many years, ending up like the group I will have - children who have learnt inefficient and inaccurate strategies to help them read and write.