Maths English Languages
I recently completed the FutureLearn Good Practice in Autism Education course, and this is a website they recommended for as a place to find and share examples of good practice from all over Europe:
I haven’t had chance to check it out properly yet, but it looks as though it could be useful.
As regular readers of my blog know, I love learning new things. As a teacher, I think it’s important to continually put myself in the position of a learner so that I never forget what it’s like to sit on the other side of the table.
I recently set myself the challenge of learning braille. A friend of mine and her mum are braille teachers and I asked them to teach me As I don’t see them often I said I would teach myself some of the basics first so that they could then teach me the more complex parts, and I promised to write my friend a letter in braille when I had managed to learn some. I’m really glad I decided to do this, as I have learn so much more than just a new way of writing the alphabet.
First of all I downloaded a fantastic app called Braille Tutor and started learning the alphabet and numbers. I also used these lovely resources from Twinkl, and these (also from Twinkl), some of which were great from practising the alphabet in context, rather than just a letter at a time. The first thing I realised was that when I first started I was confusing some of the letters for each other.
Take a look at these two letters and you’ll notice that they are very similar. The i and the e are mirror images of each other.
Now look at these and you’ll notice they are like two sides of a square being rotated anti-clockwise by 90° each time.
This gave me a much better understanding of what it must be like to be dyslexic because I mixed up the i with e, and d, f, h and j in a similar way to how people with dyslexia confuse m with w, and b, d, p and q. Even though I knew that these were different letters and that the orientation was important, somehow my brain just kept flipping them over and turning them round.
Learning to read braille has reminded me of how much understanding you lose when you have to decode every word instead of reading fluently – I had to keep taking breaks to mentally recap what I had just read. I always encourage weaker readers to pause and consolidate what they have read before moving on, but my experience reading braille has shown me that I actually need to make them do this much more often with smaller chunks of text.
Once I was confident with the alphabet and numbers I decided it was time to try writing a letter to my friend. I quickly decided that a braille printer was waaaay outside my budget, and so I bought a slate and stylus from Amazon instead.
This was my second lightbulb moment. Anyone who works in education will know the frustration of marking work and finding that there are no capital letters and very few full stops. I wrote a post some time ago about this (Why do they do that?) but I now have some new ideas to explain this….
I knew exactly what I wanted to write, and I sat down to compose my letter. Half-an-hour later and my first three attempts were languishing in the recycling bin. I mentally crossed out most of what I had planned to say, and sat down again to write a very basic note. It took me an hour to write 5 lines, and when I read back over what I had written, I noticed that I had missed quite a few capital letters and some punctuation. Obviously I know how to use capital letters and full stops, so what on earth had gone wrong?
The problem was that it’s hard to write braille. You have to remember what the pattern of dots for the letter you want to write is and then you have to reverse it (because with a slate and stylus you work from right to left and mirror write, so that when you turn the paper over the embossed dots are the right way round) – and remember some of those letters are hard to tell apart anyway! You have to make sure that you have placed the stylus in the correct part of the cell and you have to use just the right amount of force – too much and you just poke a hole in the paper; not enough and the indent doesn’t show through clearly enough on the other side. I found I was concentrating so hard on all of this that there was no brain power left for anything else, such as remembering to add in the symbol that means “capitalise the next letter”, and so on a couple of occasions it just slipped my mind.
I’m sure it must be like this for many children in our classrooms, and this experience has helped me to understand exactly how much effort goes into writing a simple sentence. Hopefully, it will also help me to think of new ways to help them so that they become able to express what they want to say, instead of limiting themselves to what they feel able to say, and so that their punctuation is accurate more consistently.
There’s still so much more I need to learn for braille. I still have the contracted form to tackle- I haven’t even mastered double letters yet so that may take a while. I’m glad I’ve made a start though. It means I can send my friend Nicki letters from time to time instead of only ever communicating by text/email and I’ve improved my teaching practice at the same time.
I’ve been interested in Special Needs education for a long time, but I’ve never really know much about Tourette’s. I stumbled across this article a few days ago and found it really interesting.
Ten Minute Training- Tourette’s Syndrome! – NEURODIVERSE LEARNING.
I don’t usually write blog posts recommending products, but I’m making an exception for this educational clock: not because it’s my brother and sister-in-law who make it, but because it’s so versatile I really believe it’s useful to teachers and carers.
Richard and Theresa are children’s nurses and they have a lot of experience working with children with special needs, and this was originally designed as a SEN clock, but I think it could also be used by EFL and MFL teachers.
It has a tickless mechanism, making it suitable for anyone who is susceptible to auditory overload, including those on the autistic spectrum. The background is clutter-free, and because they’re customisable you can choose how much or how little information goes on there, depending on what the child can cope with. They recommend having the hour hand only as that is the most distraction-free, but if you really want the minute and second hands as well, you have the option to have them in a different colour to the hour hand so that they blend into background.
The magnetic pictures make a great visual timetable for anyone who needs structure to the day. I think they work better than a traditional visual timetable, which usually consists of pictures blu-tacked along the bottom of the white board, because the clock shows at a glance whether it is a long or short time to the next event – especially useful for people with a poor concept of time.
You can choose between pictures only, or pictures and numbers, depending on the individual it’s for. The write-on wipe-off surface makes it ideal for teachers, TAs and carers to write additional notes on there, such as required doses of medicines.
The versatility of this clock would also make it ideal for the EYFS setting.
The fact that the pictures have words written under them made me realise that this clock would also be really useful to EAL children. It’s bewildering to be somewhere where you don’t understand the language, and this clock could help introduce structure and reduce anxiety levels for children who have only recently arrived in the country. The pictures would indicate what lesson was next and the words would reinforce the English word for that subject. Because the pictures are magnetic, it’s easy to swap them around for days when lessons happen in a different order.
Thinking about the benefits to EAL children led me to thinking about MFL teachers – most things do because I am one! Because the clocks are custom-made, there is no reason why you can’t have one made with the subject labels in whatever language your class is learning. Most primary school learn one language all the way through KS2, but if your school alternates there is no need to buy a whole new clock when you change languages – you can just order a new set of magnetic pictures.
These clocks are also ideal for children who are learning to tell the time in any language. The pictures can easily be replaced with magnetic words (y cinco, zehn nach, et quart, twenty past) or numbers. You could easily put just the o’clocks first and then add the half and quarter hours and the five minutes as you learn them.
If you have an idea in your head of what a fully customised clock like this is going to cost, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. For more info visit Trip Clocks.
A few days ago I read something that made me really angry. It was an article written by a parent about how the education system is letting her children down. At first I was sympathetic, and found myself nodding along with what she was saying. I agree that the education system isn’t perfect. I agree that sometimes, some children slip through the net and don’t get the help they need. But then she used the words that are guaranteed to infuriate me: “What’s the point in making them study French when they can’t even read and write English?”
It’s not the first time I’ve come across this attitude, and I’m sure it won’t be the last, but it makes me cross and it makes me sad. I’m an MFL specialist so maybe I’m biased, but I can see plenty of reasons not to withdraw children from MFL lessons – including and especially those with learning difficulties. Let me explain….
What do French, Spanish, German, Italian and Dutch have in common? That’s right…they are all languages. So is English, so already we have identified something that English and whatever foreign language the child is studying have in common!
As languages, French, Spanish, German etc use grammar – just like English. And so here is my first reason for not withdrawing a child from their MFL lessons: in MFL we talk about grammar. We use words such as noun, verb, adjective, definite article, preposition….all the words the child is being taught in their English lessons are being reinforced in their MFL lesson. If they didn’t understand it first time, here is a golden opportunity to go over it again, in a different context. In MFL lessons we talk about the fact that verbs change their endings depending on who is doing them, and compare this to English “I look, you look” but “he looks”, so again there is more reinforcement of grammar. We talk about the different tenses and when to use them, and we look at how to structure a sentence and guess what…..we compare all this to English too. We look at similes and alliteration. We practise dictionary skills. In MFL, more than in probably any other lesson, we reinforce what they are learning in their English lessons.
It’s not just grammar that MFL helps with; it’s spelling too. In MFL lessons we look at spelling patterns and we talk about which ones are similar to English and which ones are completely different. More importantly, we think about how to remember the spellings of the words, and these techniques can be transferred to their English lessons.
It’s not just their English that benefits. When we learn how to count in a different language, or how to tell the time, we’re reinforcing their maths. When we look at countries where that language is spoken we are reinforcing their geography. The children study the culture of those countries (PSHE and RE), investigate the rhythm of language (music) and perform role plays (drama).
The other important thing about language – all languages – is that they are a means of communication. It isn’t just about reading and writing. Communication also involves speaking and listening, and we do plenty of that in MFL lessons. Just because a child struggles to spell, or to hold a pencil, doesn’t mean that they can’t excel at speaking, and just because a child finds speaking and listening difficult doesn’t mean they can’t do well with reading and writing. Last year I taught Spanish to a child who had several learning disabilities including dyslexia. He found writing difficult, but he really got the concept of adjective agreement and was able to show his understanding with the way he pronounced words when speaking, and he was really proud of his achievement. I’ve taught French to Deaf children because the school believed that they should have the same opportunities as hearing children. Some of them found it difficult, but some of them did really, really well with it. What a shame it would have been for those children if they’d been pulled out of language lessons because somebody decided it would be too hard for them.
My dream is for more people to take this attitude. To stop saying “What’s the point?” and to start saying “Why not?” Because maybe, just maybe, MFL could be the one subject the child excels at.
Addition 17-08-16
I came across this article recently, which gives a few more reasons: Why foreign languages have a place in autism education