Honoring the Child with Dyslexia in a Montessori Classroom

Montessori Life, 2009 by Skotheim, Meghan Kane

Dyslexia's Hitch

Current brain research, like that done at the University of Washington Multidisciplinary Learning Disability Center or the Yale Center for the Study of Learning and Attention, shows that there are three neural pathways for reading: parieto-temporal, frontal, and occipito-temporal. Good readers activate all three pathways, especially the occipito-temporal, or word form area. Says Shaywitz (2003, p. 79), "After a child has analyzed and correctly read a word several times, he forms an exact neural model of that specific word." Just seeing the word in print activates the word form area and all of the necessary information is retrieved. Readers with dyslexia, however, rarely use the occipitotemporal pathway; rather, they concentrate all of the work in the frontal lobes, where word analysis and articulation occur. In essence, they are analyzing each word as they read it without the help of the word form area. Dyslexies often treat language as logographic and can fail to see word families (Broomfield & Combley, 2003). The process of reading remains a slow and difficult task

This inability to retrieve the correct word is evident in speech patterns (VaiL 1990). Children with dyslexia will often describe the function of an object rather than give its label. For example, when trying to name a fork, such a child may s ay," It's that one that you stab your food with." Their speech is peppered with fillers like "ummm," "stuff," or "thingy." They sometimes come up with a word that is nearly right: "lotion" for ocean, "humanity" for humidity. Or they mix up compound words and say "mawnlower" for "lawnmower." These difficulties with word retrieval coexist with poor phonemic awareness skills, creating a world where reading and writing are difficult, confusing, laborious, and often without meaning. But the great news is that the same brain research that shows how the dyslexic brain functions also shows how early intervention and remediation can change the pathways of the brain and pave the way for reading success.

Finding the Eight Percent

Good teachers often just "know" that a child is developing atypically. But rarely is that enough to get the child the help she needs. Some simple screening procedures can provide data to show parents and other professionals and can lend confidence to a hunch. The following are several screening activities for the classroom teacher:

1. In a small group, play rhyming games. Place objects on the rug and then ask the children to find which doesn't belong: cat, rat, bat, or dog. Make up answers to songs like "Down by the Bay": Did you ever see a whale with a ______ ? Note that nonsense answers are fine as long as they rhyme! Try phonemic deletion: say mice without the"m" - "ice."

2. Ask the child to find his name in a group of names on name tags or on cubbies.

3. Note the third period (of the three-period lesson) and repetition with the sandpaper letters. Is the progress slow and labored? Does the child claim to feel tired?

4. Play "I Spy" and sort objects or pictures by initial sounds. Is the child able to hear and say the initial sound?