English Support

Our brains are amazingly complex allowing each one of us to develop our own unique talents and skills.

We use our right brain when dealing with words, imagining new ideas in art and music, taking risks and expressing out feelings. Our left brain is used in science and maths, for planning strategy and working logically through problems. We all learn in different ways.

What have all these people got in common?

Thomas Edison - inventor of the lightbulb,

Tim Tebow - quarterback,

Steve Jobs - chairman of Apple, inventor and entrepreneur,

Whoopi Goldberg - actress and chat show host,

Will.I.Am - singer, songwriter, DJ and record producer)

All of them have some dyslexic type difficulties with reading and spelling. But all of them were determined to overcome their difficulties and develop their own unique skills.

Tim Tebow said, “You just have to understand how you learn and how you process information. When you know that you can overcome a lot of obstacles that come with dyslexia. When you figure out how you learn, you can accomplish whatever you want.”

At Acacias extra support is provided for pupils who find reading and spelling skills more challenging. A variety of multisensory strategies are used to build up phonic knowledge and apply it in writing and reading.

During one to one and small group sessions children will:

Learn about the letters, their names and sounds and how to use a dictionary effectively
Develop memory skills to make it easier to hold and manipulate information in their heads
Create a collection of personalised reading and spelling cards, which are used as memory aids
Develop cursive handwriting to make it easier to remember the shape of letter patterns and words
Look for patterns in spelling and learn how to apply spelling rules
Learn to spell high frequency words
Develop decoding skills in reading

At home

There are lots of different ways to practise new skills at home:

Try writing letters in some sand or with chalk or perhaps trace them on another person’s back for them to guess.
Practise spellings by writing them with different colours and different pens and pencils using a cursive style.
Try writing your spellings with your eyes closed
Cut letters out of a newspaper or magazine to practise spelling key words
Make a wordsearch with your spellings for someone else to solve