SENCO AWARD 2008
In November we launched our first Dyslexia-Friendly Best Practice Award to celebrate National Dyslexia Awareness Week (3-9 November 2008) . We invited sencos to write 350-400 words about their innovative ways of working with staff to raise awareness of dyslexia and explain how this has helped establish a dyslexia-friendly environment in their school.
The Prize
The total bundle of hardware and software is worth £1200 (ex VAT)!
- Toshiba Laptop pre-installed with Microsoft Office (Education)
- Texthelp Read & Write Gold
- Nessy Learning Program
- Nessy Fingers
- Inspiration
- one day free consultancy session from myself on using the software.
The Winner
Our most deserving winner of our Dyslexia Friendly Schools Award is Mrs Suzanne Edwards, Notley Green Primary School, Great Notley, Essex. The competition drew a lot of interest, but we felt that the commitment to promoting dyslexia awareness within her school was exemplary.
The methods and approaches Suzanne adopted for staff training were imaginative and insightful and included:
- Asking staff to copy Greek from the board and from a sheet next to them to highlight how children might feel if they were asked to copy information. The staff felt it was much easier to copy from a sheet next to them which then prompted the question – do children need to be copying chunks of information which was discussed at length.
- To highlight the fact that children have word-finding difficulties, staff were invited to talk to the person next to them about their hobbies, without using words with the letter ‘s’. This was a challenge and it highlighted to staff that more time needs to be given to these children to enable them to process the information they are given in order to give an answer.
- Changing the colour of the interactive whiteboard to make it easier for children to read, copying worksheets on a range of colours and using more visual information.
- To support children in their writing the school have introduced different ways of recording information – through mind maps, whiteboards, use of tape recorders, scribes and looking carefully at what information the children are asked to put in their books.
- The staff use a creative curriculum throughout the whole school, focusing on the six areas of learning and display wordlists, key facts, questions and a range of other material to support the children in their learning.
Special Award
We were so impressed by the entry from Coedcae School, Llanelli which outlined how Mrs Devra Applebaum (specialist teacher) had significantly raised the profile of dyslexia within both her school and its partner primaries that we have presented Devra with a ‘special award’.
This consists of:
- an upgrade to the latest version of TEXTHELP Read & Write
- Olympus Digital recorder
- a copy of Audio notetaker
- one day free consultancy session from myself on using the software.
Update on our winners
I will be interviewing Suzanne and Devra towards the end of term to see how they have used the software and hardware to support their dyslexic learners and will post their progress on ’Sharon's Corner’.
If you would like to find out more information, or register your interest for this year's awards, please email senco-award@dyslexic.com with your name and contact details.
