The Individual Learning Program is a weekly session developed by an educational psychologist with a good understanding of my learning weaknesses. Weekly lesson are conducted on a one-to-one basis. The objectives of each learning session were designed to address specific learning weaknesses identified from the assessments to identify learning disability (refer Disability).
I get bored easily especially when instructions are given to me without any visual aids such as color, pictures, drawing or story. I often lose attention and focus and to keep me interested, will either day-dream or keep myself awake by asking question suddenly which is often irrelevant or not appropriate to the context of the lesson.
The use of a visual schedule helped to direct my focus on the task for each lesson which lasted for an hour. My mother continued the use of a visual schedule that guided me in the completion of daily school assignment.
 Example of visual schedule for a lesson |
Due to visual processing weaknesses, I had difficulty in writing letters and numbers as I would get confused with the sides of the letter shape, especially letters p, s, b, d, k, g, f, t, j and numbers 2, 3. To correct letters and numbers reversal, I learnt to visualize letters and numbers in the form of pictures so that I could have an internal image of the letters.
Here is an example of the use of picture letter strategy to learn the letter “s”. First, I was given a picture of a snake with forked tongue on the right. After drawing attention to the direction where the forked tongue is, I was asked to write the letter s with a visual image of the snake with the forked tongue in my head.
 Sea Snake |
After following the therapist’s instruction to write the s below the picture, I decided to decorate the border of the picture with the letter s and in different colors.
I continue to practice with other letters after the session. Below is an example of how I remember the direction of the letter s, g and b in order to correct my letter reversal problems.
 Letter s, letter g, letter b |
This program encourages the child to become aware of her attention to work during the lesson time. It begins with the teacher/parent sitting next to the child and tapping at every 10 second intervals with the prompt “Are you working?”
I responded well to this program. Other distracting sounds and visuals like dinosaur toy was introduced so that I will be able to work when there are other noises or visual distraction in the classroom environment, such as children moving around and rustling papers. My mother was further guided to continue with the Am I working schedule to develop attention on daily tasks such as brushing my teeth, taking my meals etc.
A problem solving approach called Stop Think Act Program was introduced. This program helped me to identify the severity of the situation before reacting to the situation.
Role play situations, examples of common situation in the classroom and playground, were presented and I got to think of three possible alternatives with minimal prompts from therapist. The role play situations were then expanded to include a check of my feelings at school and with friends in challenging situations that before I would simply give up and bawl my eyes out. After a few months of the program, I was able to identify the problem and learned to problem solve in more than one way. I also developed the ability to see the situation from what I would do to how others may conceive my actions to be.
I learn to condense thoughts and ideas into a concept map by using a big butterfly diagram to describe what, who, where and why a given story took place. This diagram helped me to organize my responses in short compositions.
 Butterfly diagram |
Other important and fundamental skills for reading, writing and composition were also given towards the end of primary 1. With the imparting of the many different learning strategies to cope with my learning difficulties, the program was discontinued after 12 months of weekly lesson.