As we are in the final month of this Real Spellers website, I wanted to post a few articles as a parting "salute" to the role this website has played in the SWI community for so long.
I have just finished one of my 5-session SWI courses that was hosted by a UK professional organization for educators of those with speech and language difficulties called PATOSS. Something about this session had so many people on fire with amazing stories. In my courses, I always encourage people to email me with questions between sessions based on the lesson ideas/activities I model in class. I often get great questions that target issues everyone in the class will gain from. So I often write quite detailed responses and ask people if they are OK with me sharing that correspondence with the group. Sometimes, I find those correspondences so rich that I ask for permission to share more widely.
I have many such stories that I never got around to publishing. But for this last month, I'm determined to share a few correspondences from this most recent 5-session SWI course.
Click HERE for the first of these stories. This one is longer than the others will be as it shares two correspondences with Juliette, the tutor who had this amazing experience with her student after just the 2nd of our 5-session course.
To get a sense of the response of this dyslexic student to Juliette's first attempt to use a matrix and word sums (before I even taught how to construct matrices). In Juliette's first mail she writes the following:
"...his mother has just texted me saying he is currently doing word building at home. He also asked for a print out of the matrix to stick up by his bed.
THANK YOU. The beginning of a new journey for me. I have never had a child so enthused by spelling."
I think this story has many lessons for those trying to understand orthography and literacy instruction through SWI. If you are registered on Real Spellers, I hope you add some thougths about this story in the comments section. The story will remain available after this month, but just not in this wonderful context of Real Spellers.
Below is a screen shot of the first page of this document. Remember, you have to click the link above to get the whole pdf. The hot links only work in the pdf!
