The Traumatic Changes in Grade Three For Dyslexic and Right-brained Students Learning to Print and Write Letters and Words

Grade Three is the end of total kinesthetic and auditory learning. Reading, spelling, memorizing, printing answers and writing sentences and paragraphs now take over as the main teaching tools. Science, Geography, Social Studies and Arithmetic are now the learning areas and each requires all the recording skills of spelling, reading and writing answers.

For many right-brained children, learning to read stories was listening to and memorizing what they heard and looking at full pictures that presented the whole story when a parent or teacher read to them. They memorized what they heard and saw and gave the stories back word for word as their photographic memories memorized the whole story by hearing the sound of the words.

This becomes a disaster for many young boys and girls because suddenly they discover this is not the way to learn to read when they get into Grade One.  They start to have problems making this adjustment and   develop difficulties printing, writing and spelling all the vocabulary words of Grades One and Two and Three.

To make things even more difficult,  the recording skills of spelling and printing words and sentences are the most difficult for the right-brained students. From Kindergarten to Grade Three, three major changes in printing letters occurs.  Upper Case letters (Capitals) in Grade One, Lower Case letters in Grade Two and Cursive in Grade Three. These changes involve the size, height, shape, slant and direction of letters and finishing with combining these letters into words.

Take what they know and change it again.  It overrides the fact that the right brain must now have to change again and again when learning something.  The right brain tends to hold the the first image it receives of the letters which are capitals.  These are imprinted in their minds. It is difficult, therefore, for them to change to a lower case letter before they even understood what the capital letters represented.  Moving onto cursive is nearly impossible for these students because the image of each single letter is now merged with all the other letters in a word.

So to recap:  a dyslexic or right-brained student ends up with a lot of confusing information that is all broken down into steps.  And every step muddles the last as far as what they are supposed to write and which type of letter they should use and then finish with combining them into words! No wonder they have such a hard time!