Tatiana Murphy - Education Specialist

The crux of accurately diagnosing reading challenges lies in assessing deficiencies in phonological awareness, which is the ability to identify and manipulate phonemes in spoken language. This approach is more effective than the traditional discrepancy model, which diagnoses dyslexia based solely on a substantial gap between a child's IQ and reading performance. By focusing on phonological skills, educators and diagnosticians can identify reading difficulties more precisely, ensuring that children receive appropriate support regardless of their IQ scores.

Too Many Schools Are Misdiagnosing Dyslexia Changing how dyslexia is diagnosed could help many more children learn to read

Creating dyslexia friendly content

https://www.tatianamurphy.com/post/how-to-create-dyslexia-friendly-content

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How to Create Dyslexia Friendly Content The difficulties experienced by some dyslexics when reading written materials can be eased or even eliminated. This guide will help you to create dyslexia friendly content, which will reduce visual stress and allow for better learning experience. Readable Fonts · Use sans serif fonts, such as Arial...

‘Nobody is normal’ campaign.

Childline has launched a new campaign ‘Nobody is Normal’. The aim is to help children understand that lacking confidence or feeling that they don’t fit in or aren’t good enough is a shared experience. Figures show that monthly average number of ChildLine counselling sessions about eating and body image increased by 32% on the pre-lockdown average. Other concerns include struggling with mental health, sexuality and coping alone.

Nobody is Normal | Childline Everyone's different, so nobody is normal. But it can be tough if that makes you feel left out or alone. Childline is here for you, no matter who you are. ...

Children who read for just 20 minutes per day read 1.8 million words per year and have higher scores on standardised tests than children who read for just 1 minute per day and only see 8000 words each year. A small amount of reading each day makes an incredible difference. Encourage them to read.

Check out this brilliant tool designed by the University of Edinburgh to find the perfect app for learning. It has been created for dyslexics but many of the apps can be used by a wider community of learners. The apps have been categorised into reading, writing memory and organisation. https://bit.ly/3llLCRG

COMMON OBSTACLES TO EFFECTIVE WRITING

Writing is a complex process, which requires understanding of how language works to make meaning in context. All students, when entering school, learn different writing genres and how to expand their meaning making resources; and they all, regardless of whether they are dyslexic or not, encounter barriers when learning to write. Learners might encounter difficulties in one or several of the following areas: skills, skills, skills as well as and .

✅ Organisational skills include such aspects as identifying purpose and audience, generating ideas, planning and sequencing writing blocks, drafting work and relating it to one’s prior knowledge or familiar context. For dyslexic learners such complex task becomes much more difficult than for non-dyslexics, because dyslexic learners might approach the task from a totally different angle, or might not have enough prior exposure to a particular writing genre due to their limited reading experience. They are likely to face breakdown in organisation, ineffective planning and inability to structure their written work.

✅ Literacy skills include spelling, word and sentence structure, punctuation and grammar. Many dyslexic learners who have weak working memory cannot attend to all these elements at the same time. Additionally, dyslexic learners often substitute words, which they do not know how to spell with the ones that they are more comfortable with. As a result, their writing vocabulary appears to be less sophisticated than the vocabulary of their peers.

✅ Mechanical skills include handwriting and special organisation. Unsurprisingly, learners who encounter barriers described above, often lack confidence in their writing abilities and experience lack of motivation when faced with a writing task.
What effective strategies can you use to help your children or students? More about it on my website https://www.tatianamurphy.com/post/common-obstacles-to-effective-writing-and-7-strategies-for-improvement

Becoming a skilled reader requires developing three abilities:

Decoding - the ability to sound out words
Fluency - the ability to read quickly and accurately
Comprehension - the ability to understand what you read.
For more about this topic visit https://www.tatianamurphy.com/post/becoming-a-skilled-reader

Hi, are your kids or students digital learns now because of COVID-19 school closures? Are they receiving a lot of study materials and finding it difficult to process many PDF files, various online articles and Google docs heading their way? For many of my students the amount of online reading they have to do now is overwhelming. I have found one solution which allows them to process a lot of their school work without help from an adult.
Speechify App can read out any text to you, be it Internet downloads, PDFs, scanned books etc. The app syncs with all your devices in real time so you can listen to audio files anywhere and it has Automatic Speed Ramping which allows you to gradually increase your listening speed and save 30-50% of your time compared to reading. It is free and you can find some very useful tips and tutorials about how to use the app at https://www.getspeechify.com
Try it and let me know what you think. If you have found other useful apps for our digital learners, I would love to hear about them.

Speechify - Turn any text into an audiobook | Text to Speech Technology