The Learning Solution

Terrific article about the need for foundational work in phonemic awareness. Thanks Light Bulb Moments Tutoring.

I’ve moved, it might be argued, more than my fair share of times, as an adult. And I’m kind of a hyper-nester. So I’ve been known to start putting out or up decorations before all the boxes are in the door. I just don’t feel at home with “naked walls.”

I have a good friend who’s the exact opposite and prefers more minimalistic decor. But also, when she and her husband bought their home, it had foundation issues. Because they knew that foundations are important, instead of wasting precious time, money, and energy painting the walls and decorating, they wisely addressed their foundation issues first.

Why? Foundations are important.

They had to jack up part of their house to fix the foundation, causing cracks in the plaster walls. Then necessary mudding & repair work needed to happen before it would make sense to paint the walls.

If they had painted & decorated the walls at first, the foundation work would have still needed to be done, & they would have had to repaint anyway. (Or, worse, maybe they would no longer have the time or money or energy to do it all again.)

That’s the thing about foundations; they have to be addressed first, before any other work makes sense. Otherwise, you’re wasting precious time and money.

This principle applies to reading instruction as well; a huge part of the foundation is in the form of something called phonemic awareness (often abbreviated as “PA”).

If a child does not naturally have this important foundational skill set, reading and spelling instruction may seem to work, to an extent. But the process will be unnecessarily laborious & frustrating.

If the child can easily orthographically map words and memorize, he or she can develop compensating strategies that will allow the underlying PA weakness to take years to surface. It will often present in spelling and can be discovered by the use of nonsense words. (Some people refer to this as “Stealth Dyslexia.”)

So it’s really best to evaluate and work on establishing a solid PA foundation, first.

Foundations are important.

Most of us—approximately 4 out of 5—come by this awareness naturally. We have “automatic brains,” when it comes to language. But the remaining 1 in 5 who have Dyslexia are “stick-shift thinkers” when it comes to language and, as a result, require explicit phonemic awareness instruction, to varying degrees.

(There are actually 6 layers of PA—& you can read a post about that from Really Great Reading Company—link in comments.)

I’ll be writing more about the resources I recommend for building a solid PA foundation, but for now, I’ll leave it at this:

The Barton Reading and Spelling System from Bright Solutions for Dyslexia does an excellent job of this. For reference, All About Reading Level 1 roughly covers the same concepts as Barton Levels 2 & 3, but leaves out the foundational PA most with Dyslexia will need.

Foundations are important.

Click on this link for more of my posts on this foundational topic:

How many do you recognize?

Famous Dyslexics
by The Dyslexia Think Tank
www.dyslexiathinktank.org

These are only a few of the MANY famous people with dyslexia.

For a longer list, go to:
http://www.dys-add.com/dyslexia.html