Current Affairs Young Czech artist helps dyslexic children
Around five percent of Czech school-goers are diagnosed with dyslexia. Although it has been proven that there is no direct link between dyslexia and IQ dyslexic children are often labeled slow and problematic, hampering them from making full use of their potential. A new learning aid just out aims to change that.
PHoto: www.ct24.cz
Children who are in any way different generally suffer for it in the
classroom. It took years for the Czech education system to accept
left-handers for what they were and not force them to write with their
right hand. Now, teachers are being made to recognize that a dyslexic child
can be as intelligent –or more intelligent – than a child without
learning disabilities. Last week a young Czech artist – herself a
dyslexia sufferer – presented the public with an audio-visual primer she
produced in cooperation with experts from Charles University. Alena
Kupčíkova explains what the new learning technique is based on.
Alena Kupčíková, photo: www.ct24.cz
“Children suffering from dyslexia tend to use the right hemisphere of
the brain more than the left which influences their perception of things.
They tend to think in pictures, which makes it hard for them to work with
letters and written words. So our learning aid is based on using pictures
to help them recognize letters in what appears to be a foreign and
confusing environment. But it is possible that our primer will help all
children learn to read because our first perception of new things tends to
be visual.”
Alena Kupčíková
Alena Kupčíkova spent six years working with pre-school children and
first graders in order to get as much information as possible for the
primer. In the learning process she devised letters which are associated
with shapes children see around them, with sounds and colours. Children are
encouraged to play with the shapes of letters and look for them in a given
environment. You have pictures in motion on screen which children have to
spot or move elsewhere – which strengthens concentration and emulates the
movement of one’s eyes in reading a text. The combination of work with
colour, sound, shape and movement has produced excellent results and
dyslexia experts in other countries have shown interest in the idea.
Photo: www.dys.cz
“The first to contact were experts from Slovakia –who want a Slovak
version of what we are offering Czech children, and because my work is
known abroad other countries have expressed interest as well. We are
cooperating with education specialists in Great Britain, Canada, France and
Germany to produce different language versions. It is a lot of work but now
that the Czech version is done we hope to move on and have the English and
German versions ready by the end of the year.”
Alena Kupčíkova is currently heading a campaign to increase awareness of dyslexia and will be travelling around the country to present her learning aid to parents of dyslexic children. At her instigation the Czech Republic marked September 9th as dyslexia day.
