I borrowed “At Home With Dyslexia” from National Library Singapore last weekend. I realised that my preoccupation with reading and writing had caused me to be myopic. The author says that the biggest challenge that dyslexic students face is their poor writing memory. Hence, my focus should be: How do I make information STICK in their minds?  

So I share the five spelling words I gave my class yesterday. Why these five words?    

My ex-Dyslexia Association of Singapore colleague shared this mnemonics about ‘because’ : ‘big elephants can always understand small elephants’

The remaining four words can be broken down into their syllables

in / te / res / ting

in / for / ma/ tion

in / ves / ti / gate

in / tri/ gu / ing  

You can get your students to break down a long word in a way that makes sense to them. For example, interesting can be conquered via in / ter / est / ing (est = short form for estimated). Whatever helps them to remember.  

This is why I isolated the syllable /ti/ because ‘ti’ exists in both Chinese and Malay (….binti…)  

Yesterday was the first time I decided to spend 30 mins just reinforcing how they should break down a long word into its constituent syllables. I will need to test their recall constantly.  

It’s my hope that when they have this strategy locked up in their mind, they will feel empowered to tackle school life. For example, as I was typing this, I realised that yesterday can be broken down as yes / ter / day. I have never really examined ‘yesterday’ before.  

Hope this helps and looking forward to your stories