I recently went for lunch with a colleague. He mentioned that I am grounded and unusual, both of which I regard as compliments. As someone who have had the privilege to apply literacy supporting strategies with teenagers, here are some lessons I learnt on empowering dyslexics this year.

1. Just because they have poor working memory doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t force them to memorise important stuff.

I told them that our human mind can retain up to 7 things in our working memory. I forced them to rattle off I am - You are - We are - They are - He is - She is - It is every lesson. Drilling is necessary for them to acquire a baseline of knowledge before they can beef up their skills.

1. Isolate the act of reading

Some students have a good ear for sounds, so they should be trained to leverage their hearing. I cut a passage into strips of paper and got them to listen to one another. Then, I would go through the paragraph with them. Some students can’t read, but when I read aloud, they were able to supply the words because they remembered the sounds. Then, it was a case of getting them to look at an unfamiliar word and pairing the sound with it. Again, drilling is necessary because we don’t have as many periods with them as our primary school counterparts.

1. Incorporating movement is necessary

Getting teenagers to sit down and work their way through the OG strategies, even in a small group setting, may not be the most effective. Energetic teenagers need to move their bodies. My most successful lesson involved me getting each student one subordinating conjunction written on a piece of paper. Then, I said two sentences and asked them if their given word could be used to join the sentences. Weeks after that lesson, they could still remember their given word. And they could rattle off all 7 conjunctions with some prompting.

1. Small doses given each lesson

It’s my usual practice to bombard students with many examples in a lesson and then move on to the next item. But I feel that it might be more effective for me to focus on just one example during a lesson. Then, for the next lesson, I would review that example and add on another example. Here’s what I did with the ‘-sion’ suffix: Thanks for reading to the end. I hope you found it useful.