At St. Clare’s School we aim to identify and support students who have Dyslexic needs.
Dyslexia is a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent reading and spelling, and for some, number placement and recognition. It occurs across a range of intellectual abilities.
The school uses Pearson’s Dyslexia Screening Test to calculate a student’s ‘at risk quota’ for Dyslexia. This screening also helps to provide a descriptive profile detailing a student’s areas of strength, and highlighting skills that may need to be improved.
To enable our Dyslexic students to work independently to produce written work, we use a speech recognition software package called ‘Dragon – Naturally Speaking’. This can be installed on individual laptops, and turns spoken words into text.
A software package called ‘Read and Write’ is also used within the school. This allows on screen text to be read aloud, increasing our Dyslexic learner’s access to digital information.
For some student’s with Dyslexia, the use of different coloured paper can make text clearer to read. Where a need is identified we provide our students with coloured worksheets, exercise books, and screen tints.
At St Clare’s we focus on the importance of learning sounds (phonemes). As a whole school we use a phonic scheme called ‘Read Write Inc.’ Students learn a new sound every week and spellings for the week will include this sound. An understanding of phonics is very important in helping Dyslexic learners improve their decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) abilities.
For more information about Dyslexia please visit http://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/