One to One Reading and Multisensory Teaching

One to One Reading and Multisensory Teaching

When I read about the reading project in Mombasa on the GVI website, I knew it would be right up my street.

At home in London I am a speech and language therapist specialising in teaching literacy to children with dyslexia. This summer I decided that I’d like to take the knowledge I have gained in my career so far and share it with people who may not otherwise have access to it. When I arrived on the project I was not surprised to hear from other volunteers that that were working with some children who were not learning to read at the same pace as their peers. 

Volunteer Lee using the resources Claire created.

They had suspected these particular children could have dyslexia,  but were unsure of how to help them. I was delighted to be able to help by creating early reading packs that volunteers would be able to use to support these children in developing basic literacy skills. This included activities to build knowledge of letters and sounds as well as high frequency words, such as ‘said’, ‘was’ and ‘the’. 

Volunteer Emma using resources Claire created.

I spent two weeks at Olives in the Standard 4 class. I found that the children here were experiencing the same difficulties with punctuation, vocabulary and sound processing as the children I teach at home, so all my teaching methods and strategies were directly transferable. I had a lot of fun teaching the children ‘Kung Fu Punctuation’ where they use their bodies to punctuation spoken sentences before writing them down.

Kung -Fu Punctuation

 In my one to one reading sessions, I worked with a girl who was struggling to retain her letters and sounds. I made a visual and tactile alphabet and helped supported her in sequencing and moving around letters to create different combinations. We repeated games with the letters to help her secure her letter sound associations and relate them to words she knew. 

Volunteer Claire teaching the sounds of the alphabet.

For me the experience has reinforced the idea that people learn best when they are using all their senses , no matter where they live in the world. It was amazing to see how well the children responded to and enjoyed the lessons. This was a great project to be involved in. Memories from my time here in Kenya will stay with me forever.

 

By Claire Warner - Volunteer

One to One Reading and Multisensory Teaching