I am a middle school language arts teacher-one of my students has been diagnosed with information and word retrieval issues. I am not a special ed teacher, and I have found very little info on dysnomia in order to help this student. Other than switching the student’s reading class to project-based learning based on reading novels and very short vocabulary quizzes, how else can I help this student? Building up vocabulary is an :?: important part of the middle school years. I am at a loss at what to do with the weekly spelling tests that are required. Thank you for any suggestions. We are a very small, private school that does not have a special ed teacher.
Re: Teaching student with dysnomia-how to help?
WOrd banks are a good scaffold — you can put enough extras in there so it’s not significantly easier.
In general, try to include visual & non-verbal information to support words whenever you can. (Being in print doesn’t really make it “visual” for many visual learners, since it’s a string of symbols that have to be translated into something to visualize.)
I’ve got some vocabulary ideas & exercises on my site at http://www.resourceroom.net under “reading comprehension” that may be helpful. You’re right - you don’t want to leave vocab. development up for grabs and you *can* do things to build it despite the dysnomia.
There is also an article in the “reading and spelling” section with some strategies for learning spelling that he may not have tried. Definitely trim the spelling lists, and organize the words he’s learning in some fashion. .. and consider doing a whole lot more repetition and review of spelling rules and patterns.
dysnomia
dysnomic children benefit from enriched language exposure. My own son is dysnomic. being dynomic does not mean necessarily that the child cannot spell - my own son was an excellent speller. If this child is not, that’s a separate learning difference from his dysnomia.
check out Mel Levine’s book on Educational Care to see if it has suggestions for the dysnomic student.
Good luck.
Re: Teaching student with dysnomia-how to help?
EPS has some nice ready made word banks that are very inexpensively priced. The basic title is “Words I Use When I Write”. You can add words to these.
CoWriter (Don Johnston.com) is a computer program that predicts words and assists in mechanical typing. However, I just saw some screen shots of the newest version and it includes a word bank (or several) feature, which looked pretty nifty.
—des
helpful books
Two resources with easy, helpful teaching ideas are Word Jogger (it’s actually a set of games for teaching word retrieval strategies) and It’s on the Tip of My Tongue.
My son has word retrieval issues. The main modification usually used is use of a word bank instead of fill in the blank type tests. My son actually does quite well on vocabulary tests but they are multiple choice/word bank type tests.
Beth