Thanks for the opportunity to crystallise my thoughts.

I think the proverb “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. To illustrate this, let me share that my work involves teaching children with dyslexia in a small group setting. However, I may not always know the best thing to do to enhance and accelerate their learning. So I decided just to do one small thing every day. Last week, I posted in the Orton Gillingham moodle platform about how much I should focus on getting students to spell all 220 words from the Dolch list.

Today, I received a reply that not all 220 words are phonetically irregular. I can just focus on those phonetically irregular ones first. Other sight words can be blended by my students, one phoneme at a time, when I teach them decoding and blending. I also printed out a copy of the phonetically irregular sight words.

Tomorrow’s step involves me laminating that list and letting my colleagues know about what I have learnt. I will also test my students the first word on this list: the.

One step at a time!