Case Study - Nick
Background
Nick is in Year 9 in mainstream comprehensive school. He has worked incredibly hard to maintain his place in the top sets of all subjects except English (middle set). His stammer worsened with the pressure of increased coursework and he was not achieving his predicted grades.
- Extremely bright student
- Good listening skills
- Positive attitude and is keen to succeed
Difficulties
- Poor word recognition
- Visual processing and tracking difficulties
- Organisation and structure of his thoughts
- Bizarre spelling
- Poor punctuation
- Secondary to these difficulties
Recommended Software/Hardware
- ‘Texthelp Read & Write Gold’ will reduce many of the difficulties Nick is experiencing with accessing text. The software will read text back to him whether it is information he has scanned in, articles on the internet or his own work. The dual highlighting will alleviate his tracking difficulties. The spell checker which reads back the suggested words should prove a useful feature for Nick. The 'Fact Folder' will reduce some of Nick's anxiety for gathering information for project based work. By creating a folder to dump the text and images, it will automatically save and collate date and source of capture, hyperlinks etc and thus the headache of producing the bibliography for Nick is removed!
- A mindmapping software such as ‘Mind Genius’ to address Nick's difficulty with structuring his thoughts for the purpose of constructing text. He can quickly produce a mindmap which at the click of a button can be transferred into a Word document producing paragraph headings ready for his writing.
If you have a student with particular needs and you want advice on appropriate solutions email me at sharon@dyslexic.com
