Honoring the Child with Dyslexia in a Montessori Classroom

Montessori Life, 2009 by Skotheim, Meghan Kane

IN MONTESSORI CLASSROOMS all over the world, children are immersed daily in communication. Our classrooms are print-rich, vibrant auditory and oral communities. And yet, statistics will note that one child in eight is moving about the classroom, struggling with a languagerelated disability (Shaywitz, 2003, p. 30). Until recently, it was thought that the preschool child was too young for either identification or remediation. So many of us held a wait-and-see attitude toward those children, we instinctively knew were not progressing through the language curriculum in the usual way. It is now clear that we can identify those children at age 4 or 5 as well as fill our shelves with materials designed to help them overcome language deficits.

Speaking, listening, reading, and writing are all language activities. The human capacity for speaking and listening has a biological foundation: wherever there are people, there is spoken language. Acquiring spoken language is an unconscious activity, and, barring any physical deformity or language learning disability, like severe autism, all children listen and speak. In contrast, writing systems must be consciously learned. A child beginning to read and write has to discover what sound each symbol in the written code stands for and, in English, understand that the sound may change depending upon the placement within a word (i.e. circus or success). For most of us, mastery of a small number of symbol-sound associations allows us to decode our written word and explode into reading (Brady & Moats, 1997, p. 4).

However, for 8 percent of the population, this process is remarkably difficult. Variable and often hereditary, this difficulty in acquiring and processing written language is called dyslexia, and it is manifested by a lack of proficiency in one or more of the processes of reading, spelling, or writing. But because dyslexia is a language -bas ed disorder, it can be predicted from language development during the pre-reading stage. As classroom teachers of many pre-reading children, we can be at the forefront of identifying and helping the child with dyslexia before the disability diminishes that motivation, confidence, and love of learning that denote a Montessori child.

How We Read

For the majority of us, reading is a step-by-step process of learning a code. For the youngest child, it begins when he realizes that print carries a message and that it moves across the page in a certain direction. As parents or caregivers read picture books to their child, they are setting the stage for learning to read and write. Most of them are also beginning the process of awakening phonemic awareness in the child: the realization that spoken words have parts. Simple rhymes and alliteration are training the child to hear words as a collection of sounds with a focus on either the initial or ending component. Children who track writing across the page, hold the book properly and flip pages from front to back, finish the ending word of a nursery rhyme, or play games with alliteration, are considered emergent readers ready for the work of cracking the code.

The work of Frith (1985) defines the next phase of literary development in three stages: logographic, alphabetic, and orthographic. In the logographic stage, the child memorizes whole words like "stop" or "love" or her own name. Once individual letters are connected to specific sounds, the child reaches the alphabetic stage, most evident with the advent of invented spelling. "Wuns upn u tim, kt wokt bi" illustrates a reader with phonemic awareness and good phonics understanding. As spelling patterns become internalized and sight words are introduced and stored for easy retrieval, the child has reached the orihographic stage. Now we see a child confident in writing a story with an equal mix of correct and invented spelling. "Once upon a tim, cat woked by."

The role of phonemic awareness in this process cannot be underestimated. One's ability to hear and produce rhyme and alliteration, count syllables through rhythm games, or segment and blend using onset and rime (see glossary) is crucial to learning to read and write. According to Shaywitz (2003, p. 55), "Reading and phonemic awareness are mutuali}' reinforcing: Phonemic awareness is necessary for reading, and reading, in turn, improves phonemic awareness still further." By early elementary, a child moves from storing images of individual letters associated with specific sounds to storing larger and larger "chunks" of common letters that frequently go together ("ing"), or groups of letters that recur ("ough"). After reading many books and decoding thousands of words, he has created a stored dictionary of entire words that can be easily and quickly accessed. A good reader recognizes words and phrases quickly, allowing his mind to move on to a focus on meaning. He has reached reading automaticity: relaxed and fluent reading or writing. All of this starts with that crucial ability to hear the individual sounds in words.