After two years in kindergarten, I still could not read, write or spell. The print in the story books did not make any sense to me and I was not interested in the words but more interested in the illustration. I pretended I could read in kindergarten by remembering the pictures that goes with the sentence at the bottom of the page.
Drawing inspiration from the specialist teachers, my mother began to channel my interest in drawing to areas of learning weakness. From the assessments for specific learning disability, priority was directed into development of visual strategies to improve foundational weakness of visual processing caused by directional confusion that prevent smooth learning of academic skills of reading and writing.
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 Can you decipher my writing? |
Reversal of letters and numbers
Since I enjoyed the visual letters strategy taught by educational therapist, my mother allowed me to decorate alphabet into shapes. I would start to doodle anywhere and anytime, mostly when working together with my mother on written tasks after school.
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 Letters of the alphabet
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With a lot of practice at decorating alphabet into shapes, I manage to internalize the shapes and pictures and eventually could consciously correct the reversal of letters and numbers in my written work.
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 A lot of practice |
In kindergarten, the teachers insisted that I erased and correct my reversals. In Primary 1, my mother informed the teachers to accept the reversal in my writing and I was not reprimanded for my poor writing. This emotional support was necessary for me to attend to other learning needs. I suspect that it was my teacher’s acceptance of my writing weakness that motivated me to put a lot of mental effort to correct the reversal.
With no demands from my school teacher to complete task which though was easily completed by my other classmates, I started to learn at my own pace. With early phonics knowledge learned at home, I started to give a letter to a picture.
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 Letter to picture |
Gradually, I saw a pattern of arrangement in groups of letters.
 Word Family |
Recognising new words became much easier after I recognized a pattern in the text given to me in school. Whatever support that my mother gave me at home made a lot of sense to me after I saw this pattern of arrangements in letters. I discovered that I could decipher words I have not seen before, just from sounding it out.