Down Syndrome

I am so pleased to announce that J. my `Down Syndrome` student has learned to read. I must admit, 2 years ago when J. first entered my tutoring room I was wondering if this Phonics Program would work for a child with Down Syndrome. Typically children with this syndrome learn to read by memorizing sight words.

As J. reads new words now, I see that he has actually mastered most of the phonetic constructs. He can take a new word, attack it phonetically and come up with the right pronunciation.

It should be noted that J. is a very high functioning Down Syndrome child.

J. has a great deal of difficulty with hand eye co-ordination and printing is a real chore that quite often does not resemble anything. He is also lost when it comes to spelling a word, until it is sounded out VERY slowly, then he sometimes gets it right.

The beauty of FUN FAMILY PHONICS is that being a song and play based program it can hold the interest of almost any child. J. loves both songs and games, and I think this has been the ticket to him mastering reading.

Stories

I needed a new approach to read the "Stories" during class time. We have highlighted the key words and I have cut them into sentence strips.
I had an idea and the kids loved it. I had 3 students, so I highlighted different words for each of them to read. We read the story with each of them reading their highlighted words. It took us 4 times to "get it right", they never wanted to give up until we were reading it smoothly. It was a great way to learn the new words.

I love to go to garage sale and find games or parts of games and reinvent them to be Fun Family Phonics Games.
This is a Dora game that I bought. The way the board is laid out gave me the idea to have each child work from the corner in to the middle. They can roll a dice and move along the black line, reading the words that they land on. First to the centre wins.