I have been really excited to share this video of this gorgeous child that I work with. Daniel is a super intelligent and insanely cute grade 2 boy, who is dyslexic. As result, he has struggled quite a bit with his reading and writing these last few years. 
What is so frustrating for me as a learning support teacher is how I very often don’t have enough time to work with the dyslexic children. In an ideal world, these kids should be getting individualised support once a day (at least). Besides the fact that there just aren’t enough hours in the day with too many kids to help….. there is also the financial constraint of parents not being able to afford 5 lessons a week. 
It was for this reason that I was absolutely thrilled to hear that Daniel’s parents had found Ronita Engelbrecht to work with their son during his school holidays. Ronita is a dyslexic expert who trained to teach the Davis Dyslexia Program in the UK. She is based in Johannesburg and flew down to work with Daniel for the last week of our holiday. (For 5 hours a day) I have heard a lot of good things about the Davis Program and I was very happy that Ronita was kind enough to let me come and spend a few hours with them, so that I could see what it was all about. I have to say it was an absolute pleasure to see Ronita work with Daniel. 😄She is bubbly, fun, energetic teacher and the two of them were laughing and giggling for most the lesson.

One of the things that I love about working with students with learning difficulties is their determination to never give up… Daniel is without a doubt one of those kids. On returning to school, I was significantly impressed with the progress Daniel had made with his reading after only one week with Ronita. I had initially tested his reading age at the beginning of the year and decided, out of curiosity, to retest it again last week. I was over the moon to see that he had made 13 months progress with his reading in just under 5 months. This truly is phenomenal and I really do give all of the credit to Ronita.😍 (She even taught him to say the alphabet backwards as you will see in the video!!! – I can’t even say the alphabet backwards.😬😬)

On returning back to school I have done my best to model the same method of teaching as Ronita. (Although as you will see..ummm it’s not always easy following the footsteps of the “expert” 😅and Daniel will very quickly inform me if I’m getting something wrong.😂😂)

I think this is such an incredible tool to be able to use with students, especially those who are more visual learners. Initially, it might seem quite time-consuming to do one word at a time, but as Ronita explained to me, this method helps learners formulate pictures in their heads to go with each word. So essentially they start to build up a database of visual words that they are more likely to remember, as opposed to them just writing out lists of words. 
Of course, there is a lot more to the teaching of this program than simply this, but I just wanted to give you an idea of what is involved. 🤗

The biggest bonus is that the kids absolutely love working with play dough and I currently use it to teach all sorts of different things, especially with my Maths. I have also already sent the playdough recipe home for a number of students that want to make it themselves. Anything that engages students and makes them eager to learn is a huge plus in my book.

So I just wanted to say I highly recommend the Davis Programm and more specifically Ronita, if your child is dyslexic or even just struggling with their reading and spelling.

One last thing I would like to add😜. Recording children as they ‘teach’ a new concept that they have just been taught is something that I was trained to do as a numbers count teacher in the UK. So recently I have been trying to use it more these days. 
a) It really does have a great effect of helping students to retain what they have learnt…and it has scientifically been proven that actually ‘teaching’ something helps you remember it better.
b) It gets children over the self-consciousness and fear of seeing themselves on camera. 
c) children love to show their parents what they are doing and to get the added praise and support at home for what they did is always a bonus. 
d)Without a doubt, t also helps you to become a better teacher as you are able to see what areas you could improve on in your teaching.😅 
Unfortunately, I made a rookie mistake making this video. Daniel asked me before we started if he could go to the toilet after we had finished recording…to which I said yes. Mmm…of course what I should have said was “go to the toilet first” 🙈🙈🙈….he doesn’t normally just run out from my lessons, but it is clear in hindsight that he REALLY needed that toilet! 😂(sorry Daniel, lesson learnt 🙄)

Finally, I just want to end by saying …”Thank you, Daniel, for always keeping me entertained. You really are a little Rockstar!!! ” 😎😍🤗🐝😇

PS You need to click the sound button at the bottome of the screen once the video is playing.