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Showing posts from March, 2018

Take pride in your scars

Take pride in your scars In the last 8 months I have ventured in the world of dyslexia have never been able to willingly disclose the fact that I am dyslexic . My experience with the condition is a little less severe but is enough to take me through all the emotional trauma that others with dyslexia go through. Here is another touching story I found on YouTube… Luke, who’s now an old man in the United States, went through a difficult time during his school days, until he had to drop out. At 69 he has no formal education and his job is to clean toilets and mop the floors of office buildings. Now, if you think that’s so unfair just hang on.....since junior level Luke loved to draw. It was, for some reason, his excuse for not paying attention in class, he said he would rather feel like just another object in class maybe a chair or the teacher’s desk than having to be humiliated and made to feel stupid or unwilling to learn. He would draw amazing art, soo amazing the teacher woul

The Reading System

The Reading system Men started using symbols as a means for communication 32000 years ago. A cave in Chau vet south of France is beautifully marked with paintings of horses, lions and tigers but also other symbolic forms such as hand paintings and crosses, which were discovered in Lascaux. Writing was invented 5400 years ago and it quickly took many forms. The Egyptians hieroglyphs, cuneiform, the Maya and Chinese are some examples of radical inventions that had never been anticipated by anything in our evolution. In these inventions we see how highly sophisticated the brain is in its ability to create writing systems, so although writing is a recent cultural invention and shows a large degree of cultural variation, reading acquisition is not. Right from birth the brain acquires sophisticated concepts of objects, space, linguistic structures, social relations …and so on, that is why we are able to read because we inherit an efficient recognition system with enough plasticity to
Writing systems Today I will introduce to you the English language. By discussing the writing system, I hope to shed light on how language is dynamic, how oral language changes but how written language is so slow in catching up. At the end of the discussion you should be able to understand the frustration of a dyslexic reader. Let’s begin by understanding the written language, written words are spoken language represented by visual form and written language can be represented in two main ways: The sound of the language, The meaning Or a combination of both. English as an alphabetic language it uses sounds of letters as visual symbols, we call these phonemes. On the other hand, Modern Yi uses syllable size sounds not small units of sounds such as phonemes.  Chinese dialects such as Mandarin are an example where there is very little sound representation in the visual system, these types of languages are called logographic languages. They use meaning as a way of transm

Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing

Elena one of the survivors, today proudly studies painting at a London art college. Her school years were made a misery and a waste especially because her dyslexia went completely undiagnosed until she was 14 years old. She could not read properly and if she did, she was unable to comprehend it. Elena took much longer to write essays or be able to learn. Her teachers would call her upfront, to the blackboard and ask her to spell words. Repeatedly she was never able to spell them out correctly let alone pronounce the words. While experiencing this frustration, her class mates would find it funny and make Elena feel stupid after all. Her teachers strongly believed she was just lazy, by humiliating her, it would encourage her to work harder…. ….A famous poet, Benjamin Zephania had severe dyslexia. He often spoke about how he dropped out of school because he was not taught how to read and write in a way in which he could learn. His learning needs were not fully understood but he did hav