Title of Product
To Live with Dyslexia
Name of Author(s)
Marina Caldeira
Name of Producer
Marina Caldeira – Gabinete de Psicologia e Orientação. Agrupamento de escolas de Amarante
Language of the review
English
Language of the product
Portuguese
Type of product
Online Publication
Thematic Area
Students with learning difficulties
Target Group
Teachers, Students, Parents
Description of Contents
This is a publication by a psychologist on a personal blog .It starts with a personal story of a mother who comes to visit the psychologist, at first timidly, searching for help for her daughter who has had three years of school failure while in primary education. The child does not want to go back to school and betrays an enormous sense of failure. The father does not understand what is the problem and would like the daughter to fulfil his dreams.The teachers haven’t come up with a solution for the child’s problem.This is not a success story, the child eventually dropped out of school because there was little knowledge about her specific learning problem, which was dyslexia.
Having laid out the very common situation, the psychologist offers an analysis of the child’ dyslexia at the core of the whole situation, by explaining how children acquire language, how dyslexia was first understood and analysed. The blog also identifies in very clear and concise language the types of dyslexia; how and when they manifest themselves in children before school and in further school stages. It describes, in graphic form, what dyslexic children like and do not like because of their learning difficulties. It also includes a list of associated school problems and learning difficulties associated with dyslexia and it includes a comprehensive list of the type of errors caused by dyslexia. The most helpful part of the blog concerns recommendations for teachers to deal with dyslexia, namely in the classroom, in school (in terms of additional support) and in relation to the child’s parents. It includes a series of tips on how to transmit knowledge with resource to specific pedagogical tools and how to assess a dyslexic student.The long list of descriptions and procedures also includes advice for parents.
Review
This is a simple text that is engaging for parents (and older students) because it tells a true story of a child who had to cope with a learning difficulty – dyslexia – and the kind of help that could have been available and wasn’t. As a consequence the child dropped out from school. It highlights how parents, teachers and supporting teachers have a role to perform in order to coach dyslexic children into school successes. Thus, the blog offers a lot of scientific information in brief topics that aim at characterizing dyslexia and helping children learn despite this difficulty. This has to do with attitudes to learning, pedagogical tools to support learning and creating a particular learning environment conducive to overcoming the many reading and cognitive barriers that children may experience when they suffer from dyslexia. In our opinion, the content is of good quality, though not too much specialized and may therefore help parents and teachers and old students have a clearer understanding of their learning difficulties if they are dyslexic and of the ways in which learning can be facilitated.
There are recommendations for teachers and for parents that nay be easily assimilated and put into practice, and as such this is a valuable document.
The kind of information contained here can be easily transferred to other school settings and developed by professionals in connection with parents. Knowing about dyslexia is the first step into being able to help the child learn with more success.
We think that one of the strengths of this material for parents is its opening through a personal story and the fact that the narrator is a psychologist who works in a school in Portugal and who admits that much is known about dyslexia that can and must be shared with the whole community.