FCJ Spelling is an app designed to help people improve their spelling with a special emphasis on dyslexia. It contains 10 exercises, customizable words, the option of a color overlay, and a fun word card game.
The app allows teachers to monitor their students’ results remotely. Once all the students in a class have been added, the teacher can view all their students’ results with the press of a single button. All results are encrypted and private.
The app was developed by three 13-year-old Irish students: Billy Lee and Eamon Lalor, and was programmed by Niall Kehoe. The team would welcome any suggestions on how they might improve the app in later editions.
The app is available on the iOS App Store free of charge at the link below, and the authors hope to release an Android version in the near future.
Studying for exams is a chore for everyone, but it can be much more difficult if the text is not accessible to the learner. eLearning has a role to play in helping these students to learn.
The website totallearn.co.uk is developing a large number of science eLearning modules to help with study. These are made accessible by having a “click to hear” function.
All text on the totallearn website can be clicked on and will be read aloud to the user.
The developer, Michael Collard, is a former science teacher who is able to describe difficult concepts in a clear, straightforward manner.
There is also a science blog on the site that is equally accessible and updated several times a week.
The developer welcomes comments and requests as the website develops. Write him at: [email protected]
Kids + dinosaurs = fun! Enjoy our new free no-prep printables with dinosaurs. Kids will have fun and train their visual and spatial perception, patterning, and counting up to 5.
You want even more dinosaurs? Check out this free online game: Dinosaur – Find the pairs! You can choose different levels. The game can be played in any browser on any computer, smartphone or tablet.
How many emails did you send today? What about Facebook updates or tweets?
Online communication is more important than ever. According to research by the email management company AWeber, over 90 percent of teens today prefer to communicate via email, text, and Facebook. Texting and social networking are increasingly our primary modes of talking to each other; in fact, a 2012 study found that 40 percent of Americans would rather text than call, while 30 percent prefer to connect with friends online instead of face-to-face.
Unfortunately, typical spelling and grammar checker tools aren’t available to you where you write most—online. Here are 5 tips for helping people with dyslexia to write better on the Web.
1) Create a short proofreading checklist for yourself. What kinds of errors do you most want to find and fix? Typically, people struggle with a few areas of grammar and spelling more than others. Maybe homonyms (they’re/their/there) trip you up, or maybe you have trouble remembering when to use a comma. Understanding your strengths and weaknesses as a writer is the first step to improving your prose.
2) Look for one kind of error at a time. Trying to fix everything all at once is a great way…to make yourself feel overwhelmed and frustrated. Instead of proofreading for all errors at once, break the task down into more manageable chunks. Start with end punctuation first (periods, exclamation points, and question marks), then move on to other punctuation (commas, semicolons, apostrophes, etc.), and finally tackle spelling. Pay closest attention to the problem areas you identified in step one.
3) Read aloud (or use text-to-speech to read aloud) to locate misspelled or missing words. Reading your emails or tweets out loud may make you feel a little sill, but according to the Writing Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, it’s one of the best ways to catch errors that you might otherwise miss. “Most people have far more experience listening to and speaking English than they do reading and editing it on the printed page. When you read your draft out loud or listen to someone else read it, your brain gets the information in a new way, and you may notice things that you didn’t see before.” If you’d rather have someone else read your text, there are a number of free text-to-speech programs available such as Natural Reader.
4) Step away and look again later. After you’ve proofread a piece of writing, take a break, step away, and then come back to it with fresh eyes. The longer the work, the more time you should take between passes. Shorter pieces of writing, such as tweets or status updates, may only require a coffee break, but important emails, blog posts, and other documents may need to rest overnight.
5) Use online grammar checking tools. American Wordspeller is a phonetic dictionary that allows users to look up words based on how they sound, not how they’re spelled. Another great tool is Grammarly Lite, a free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox 4+ and Safari browsers that alerts you to potential grammar mistakes before you post or hit “send.” It also catches contextual spelling errors (typing “horse” when you meant “house,” for example) and has a built-in thesaurus for those times when the right word eludes you.
Without non-verbal cues like tone of voice or facial expressions, text-based communications rely entirely on the quality of your writing. Put your best text forward!
Blog Post provided by Grammarly.comGrammarly improves communication among the world’s 2+ billion native and non-native English writers. Our flagship product, the Grammarly® Editor, corrects contextual spelling mistakes, checks for more than 250 common grammar errors, enhances vocabulary usage, and provides citation suggestions. More than 4 million registered users worldwide trust Grammarly’s products, which are also licensed by more than 350 leading universities and corporations. Grammarly is a privately-held company with offices in San Francisco and Kiev.
The American Dyslexia Association offers more than 1,500 free worksheets on its website. They are built on the AFS method, the approach used worldwide in individualized dyslexia and dyscalculia training. Everything is free to download, and you may use it at school, at home, or in tutoring.
When a child has dyslexia or dyscalculia, correcting the errors alone changes very little. The errors are the visible end of a longer chain. A child also has to be able to hold attention through a whole page, and the senses that carry reading, writing, and calculating have to be trained alongside the schoolwork itself. That is the reasoning behind the way these worksheets are organized.
What the worksheets cover
AFS stands for Attention, Function, and Symptom, and the collection follows those three areas.
Attention. Short, focused exercises that ask a child to stay with one task and notice detail. Find the shape, spot the difference, match the pair, complete the pattern.
Function. Training for the sensory perceptions that reading and arithmetic rest on: visual and spatial perception, visual and auditory sequencing, differentiation, and memory. This is the part most worksheet collections leave out entirely.
Symptom. The schoolwork itself. Letter recognition, reading, spelling patterns, number decomposition, counting, and the four basic operations.
Who they are for
Most sheets suit children in kindergarten through the elementary grades, roughly ages 5 to 11, and many work well with older children who need to rebuild a foundation without being handed material that looks babyish. Parents, classroom teachers, homeschooling families, tutors, and Certified Dyslexia Trainers all use them. No account and no sign-up is required.
How to use them so they actually help
Short and often beats long and rare. Ten focused minutes a day does more than an hour on Sunday.
Take all three areas, not just the last one. A child who only ever practices spelling is practicing the symptom while the cause stays where it was.
Stop while it is still going well. Ending on success is what makes a child willing to sit down again tomorrow.
Watch how the child works, not only what the answer is. Where the eye jumps, where attention slips, and which errors repeat tell you more than a score.
Print rather than fill in on screen where you can. Handling the paper, tracing, cutting, and coloring are part of the exercise.
More free material on this blog
The worksheet library is not the only free resource here. Our own printable freebies are published regularly and cover perception training, counting, tracing, and seasonal activities. For handwriting practice you can build your own sheets with the handwriting worksheet generator, and there is a matching tool for printable math worksheets if arithmetic is the harder subject at your kitchen table. The freebies overview page collects the lot.
If you want to work this way professionally
Worksheets support training, but they do not replace knowing which area a particular child needs. That is what the AFS-Test establishes and what trainers learn to read. If you work with children and want the full picture, the ADA-accredited certification for dyslexia trainers teaches the testing and the training together, and the first lesson is free to read.
More free material: our complete list of free dyslexia resources for parents and teachers covers worksheets, generators, daily exercises, a free math app, and a parents portal, plus how much daily practice a child needs.
More on this topic: the worksheets are free because the American Dyslexia Association is a 501(c)(3) public charity, supported by donations and memberships. Read what ADA’s 501(c)(3) dyslexia charity status means.
New for Halloween: download 10 free Halloween worksheets that train seeing, hearing, counting, and reading, with an answer key for parents and teachers.
Cher? Tom Cruise? Salma Hayek? Anthony Hopkins? Jamie Oliver? Albert Einstein? Agatha Christie? Alexander Graham Bell? Robin Williams? Danny Glover? John Lennon? and Muhammad Ali?
What do these famous people all have in common? As you might have guessed from the title yes it is that they are all Dyslexic.
Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty which makes it hard for you to learn to read, write and spell correctly. We do know that developmental dyslexia is inherited, so that, thanks to our DNA, we can be born with it. Dyslexia affects around 8% to 10% of the Irish population. The National Institute of Health reports that up to 15% of the U.S. population have learning challenges.
If you have dyslexia you may have trouble with reading, writing, spelling, maths, and sometimes even music. Dyslexia can occur at any level of intelligence, and has many disguises so that teachers and parents may instead erroneously observe children lacking motivation or “not trying hard enough”.
A dyslexic brain shows very little activity in areas known to be of high importance to connecting the written form of words with their phonetic components. Thus to read, people with dyslexia must create new neurological pathways. Compensation is made by using more use of a front-brain section called Broca’s area, commonly connected with other types of language speech and processing.
How might I know if I or my child has Dyslexia?
Here are a few of the main symptoms: • Delayed speech development • Speech problems, such as not being able to pronounce long words properly • Problems expressing themselves using spoken language • Little understanding or appreciation of rhyming words • Spelling that is unpredictable and inconsistent • Putting letters and figures the wrong way
A Sound Solution?
Alphamusic composer John Bram Levine believes that if you can slow the brain waves down to the Alpha state, then the useless mind chatter and negative self-talk of doubt and fear may vanish, whilst the left and right brain communicate more effectively, allowing information to be more easily absorbed, processed, and remembered. Levine studied electronics, graduating with a degree in Music Composition from Sydney University, following which he learnt meditation. He challenged himself to formulate music that could induce the same Alpha brainwave state achieved during meditation. A new genre was born: ‘Alphamusic’.
Does it work?
Stewart Holmes, a dyslexic, hated studying. ‘It was all too hard and frustrating until by accident I played ‘Silence of Peace’, an Alphamusic album, whilst revising. I felt as if a curtain surrounded the words on the page, allowing me to absorb the words and meaning freely and easily. I was astonished as no other music, whether it was new age, relaxation, classical, rock, or jazz, has ever had this effect on me.
Amy Turner-Monk was determined that her dyslexia was not going to stop her from realizing her dreams, so she applied to the Open University and asked for assistance with her learning difficulties. The dyslexia assessor recommended she use Levine’s Alphamusic whilst studying. Until her discovery, Amy could only read for 10 minutes before being tired and distracted and needing to take 30 minutes to rest before continuing, ‘it all was quite draining’. ‘Using this brain wave transforming album ‘Silence of Peace’, I found I could study for more than an hour at a time without any exhaustion.’
Although such testimonials and Cambridge University studies have shown a positive link between Levine’s Alphamusic and enhanced learning, more research needs to be done in this area, to investigate if music truly could be the golden key to solving the dyslexic puzzle. Levine is interested in hearing from anyone who would be interested in engaging in such research.
Here is another “I spy…” freebie. Children simply love them. This time it is called “I spy … superheroes”. Print, color, count, and simply enjoy all the fun. At the same time, children train attention, visual perception, and fine motor skills.
Spring is in the air, so we thought it was about time for a new freebie. Give your children some coloring pencils and let them color and search. Then, they count how many they find of each object. Use this opportunity to talk about “more than…”, “less than…”, etc. This exercise trains attention, visual, and spatial perception, and fine motor skills – important skills for reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Sudokus are everywhere: in almost every shop to buy, and on the internet as free printables or to play online. So why another post about Sudokus? Because it is not easy to find good Sudoku puzzles for children, and it is even less easy to find Sudokus with symbols. Worksheetworks.com, however, offers a free symbol Sudoku generator. Simply choose the symbols, how many Sudoku puzzles you want (one or four per page), choose the difficulty level, and click “create worksheet”. You get a PDF which you can save or print. Both a solution and an explanation of the solution are included.
We like symbol sudokus very much. Young children can solve them as well and are very proud of being able to do the same kind of puzzles as adults. Older children like the extra challenge of drawing the symbols – this trains creativity and visual perception. What more can you wish? Access the Symbol Sudokus here
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