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Positive AHA Moments
I get to observe  my mentor doing withdrawal for students with reading difficulties where she made use of the this Internet website called starfall and also with the use of flashcards to go through sight words and blending words because the student was from lower primary and she provided additional support to help her further. She also get the students to sky write as they say the sound.

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One AHA moment I had was in giving support to a boy with dyslexia, who also had poor attendance, no interest in learning and reading difficulty and a self-belief that he cannot learn and cannot do well.

Understand reasons behind why he has difficulties (personal family issues and commitment),

Worked on his own belief to change his self-talk to be more positive and that he can do it and that he will and can get better.

Spend available time with him to catch up on his studying of his spelling given by EL teacher, and helped with his memorisation, in repetition and connections with his prior experiences.

Built teacher student relationship and rapport and spent time going through his worksheets.

Memory, connections to his interest (soccer in school) , figured out his preferred learning style.

He was proud that he did well for some work and like to show (and spell out!) me his results!

AHA! :D

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My school had this pupil who was in primary 3/4 and still did not know his alphabets well and could hardly read. Pupil has long term absenteeism issue and he missed most part of his early years of education. My mentor started giving him intervention in P5 onwards. Now he is in P6, he is able to read at least a P3 level passages now. My mentor taught him from basic like oral language practices, phonics, used progress monitoring for his reading and used elkonin board to test his sounds etc.

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I observed my mentor help a P3 student who has difficulties with reading. The student was quite reluctant to even try reading a single word. What my mentor did was to start by playing some language games with her to ease up the tension and afterwards read the Stellar books with her. After that she was more willing to open up and my mentor could start with teaching phonics to the student.

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My mentor have been helping this particular p5 girl who has GDD since primary one . He has been using flash cards and “I do, we do , you do model to teach her sight words and many more. He also uses cards that has picture related to the words that he is going to teach her such as “ Bat”, “Bed”, “Bread” . He also bring real things to show illustrations such as a real fork , a pair of socks , scissor , plate, ball etc to let her feel and touch. He also used soft magnetic letters to ask her to forms that she has been taught that day . He always use rewards and positive words to encourage her to learn as well.  At this stage , she can read most of the Peter and Jane books that he assigned her to.

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Munira

I was asked to teach a group of P1s in a reading programme run by the English Department. Having no experience with phonics, I observed a few of the teachers' class. One of the Aha moments was when I noticed that younger children enjoyed watching funny videos and songs, especially when they get to sing or act together and they can associate the sounds and lessons being taught better. So I always make it a point to include songs or activities in almost every lesson.

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My mentor go through with a pupil who has reading difficulty by going through sight words cards daily for about half an hour three times a week. With this method, the pupil confidence grew steadily over time.

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During my school stint, me mentor allowed me to take a few lessons with a student who is suspected/undiagnosed with dyslexia. This student has issues with his spelling. I have zero experience with teaching phonics and this was a very eye opening experience. Through observations how my mentor started off her lessons, using examplars (explicit teaching & giving examples).
One thing that really stuck on to me is that:
Before crafting out lesson plans and strategies, it is important to so a pretest to assess the student so as to allow AED LBS to plan out which areas of needs and skills that is lacking.

**Focus should be on the skills needed to teach the child instead of the resources and strategies.

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I had observed my mentor help a student with Dyslexia and reading difficulties through reading practices twice a week. He was also made to read 150 high frequency words twice a week. With time, his speed and accuracy improved. I observed that he felt a sense of accomplishment as we reviewed his reading records and he could see a trend of improvement. He was also advised to use a ruler or a piece of paper to cover up the rest of the passage while he reads a sentence.

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My mentor helped a students with reading difficulties by using phonics flash cards and also sdr word cards to support them with their readings

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I had a few students who had reading difficulties and in class we had spelling quizzes to help build their vocabulary. For these few students I would work with them by separating the words and sounding out the syllables for them. After a few sessions they were able to sound out words on their own especially words ending with -tion. Their spelling results also improved over time.

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My Senior LBS taught me to use CVC to teach our student with reading and spelling difficulties. She gave a modified spelling list after teaching CVC to the student as the student was unable to read or spell the schools spelling word list hence, we started with a list of CVC words. She was able to sound out the phonemes and was able to blend the words. Hence, tasting success for the first time as she has been failing spelling and it upset her and she felt ashamed.

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My fellow AED T&L goes all the way to source for visual resources, sometimes at her own expense, to help her students with phonemic awareness. She will make her lessons very engaging and interesting - full with hands-on activities.

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The LBS in my school will pull out her pupils with reading difficulties every day for 5 mins during their recess so that she could do sight words with them. She used precision teaching as a technique for them to practice reading sight words. They would usually start off with just reading 3 to 5 words in the first 50 list of words to actually reading the whole list of 50 words after a few months of precision teaching.

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With my mentor's guidance,  I played a board game called sequence where students will work with the sounds and gets interested to learn as they seem more relaxed.

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I had the opportunity to observe my mentor in helping out stidents with reading difficulties during my school stint.

She uses reading apps on the ipad to help them where the app read out the stories for them and the students will listen and try to familiarise the sound to the word.

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Getting to know what the students like and linking words for example to their favourite sports. One of the boys she taught loves Soccer and food. She tried to find passages on that. The student was quite motivated even though he cant read the whole passage and he picked up the words quite fast. This is coupled with deciding skills

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My mentor have been helping a P1 boy with his reading. As progress monitoring, she will do it using the fry first 100 words. She helped the boy by reading together with him and after that pick up the words that rhymes and came up with word family. Like bat, cat, hat. After which she will recall sight words with the boy thru flash cards. After a few sessions, the boy will be able to recognise the words that was read before.

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My stint was in a secondary school. What my mentor did to help a boy with dyslexic with reading difficulty is chunking of  words. Every session he will specifically pick some keywords and taught the boy how to breakdown the words in order for him to spell the words easily.

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Salinah Saleh
My son has difficulty to pronounce letter N at the age of 5. He was referred to speech therapist at KKH. The senior therapist was aware of his issues and teach my boy a technique that he uses it till today. When attempting to make the sound, my son had to use his index finger to cover his left nostril and placed the thumb below his lower jaw. This technique also lessen his stress and improves his pronounciation.

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Previously, I have a student who join the school from China as a Sec 1 NT student. Her reading competency is only at Primary 5. My school has reading time twice a week for 20 minutes after assembly, during this period I will bring a book and read with her to help her to improve her reading efficiency. This is on top of her sessions with our English teacher 2 times a week after school. I started off with a English book meant for Primary 5, during the reading I also got her to record the correct pronunciation for words that she can’t pronounce. After that i proceed with a book a level higher and I try to cultivate a reading habit in the child outside of school. After 1 year of persisting with her, she showed tremendous improvement in her reading and that shows in the language. She became more confident as she became more involved in group discussions.

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One activity that left me with deep impression is by one of my colleague in the English department (secondary school). Instead of picking students who are eloquent to do presentations for school events, which is a usual practice, she prefers to pick students who needs help in reading to so presentations. She encouraged them by allowing them to start from small presentations in class, to slightly bigger events, to school wide events. She also records them so that the students can rate and reflect on their progression.

Our school now has many confident speakers. 👍

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Pupil was able to verbalise letter sounds. However due to lack of support at home and pre-primary level, pupil was unable to blend cvc words. He had expressed interest in reading but was unable to do so. We did blending exercises repeatedly and played a simple game at the end (I say a word, he will identify the initial, middle or ending sound). With regular intervention sessions, pupil managed to progress and started to blend cvc words improving his confidence. Now he is independently trying and learning to read.

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I helped a student with reading difficulties learn letters and letter sounds. He is 11 years old but still cannot recognise all 26 letters. I used flash cards with letters and objects to help him to with letters sounds. I also taught him sight words and family words.

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I was supporting a Primary 1 student during my 1 year stint. The intervention lasted for about a year. By the end of my stint, he was already in Primary 2.

When he was in Primary 1, his foundation in English language is very weak. He can speak but vocabulary is limited. He can barely recognise letters and sight words are foreign to him.

After 52 weeks of intervention, he was able to recognize all the letters and was able to spell basic sight words. I was so touched when i saw him writing an essay all by himself with minimal support from me. I am glad he has benefited from the intervention program and is now able to catch up with the rest of his classmates.

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My mentor is super patient to support student with reading difficulties by guiding them to decode the words that they are unfamiliar with. She would either segment the words into smaller words or using phonogram