“Gentlemen, turn and talk – go,” Triad Elementary School Principal Lee Claypool told her students Thursday evening.
These students were not the typical children in her classroom, though. Instead, they were the members of the Board of Education.
Claypool spent Thursday evening’s meeting giving a mock lesson to demonstrate how Triad teachers are implementing new strategies required by the “Dyslexia Supports” legislation signed by Gov. Mike DeWine.
The principal said dyslexia is a learning disability that causes students to experience challenges with a lack of word recognition, poor spelling and difficulties decoding the meanings of words.
To demonstrate a lesson that would help students with these challenges, each board member was given a dry erase board, square tiles with letters on them and a plate of sugar.
Claypool began by sounding out the word “mop” syllable by syllable, and asking the board members to use their tiles to try to spell the word.
Next, they were asked how the word could be changed to “mom.”
In pairs, they used their fingers to draw the new letter – “m” – in the plate of sugar. Claypool explained that this step would allow her to see how students were writing their letters and correct any mistakes, such as drawing them backwards.
From that point, the group used their new word to create a simple sentence: “Mom is great.”
Claypool asked the group to point out “certain elements” a sentence must have, like a noun and a capitalized letter at the beginning.
Together, they each wrote “Mom is” on their board, before drawing four boxes, or “sound boxes.” The board members were then asked to fill each box with the letter they felt made each sound in the word.
Claypool explained that this can help teachers decipher students’ knowledge of phonics, such as vowel pairings.
To end the lesson, they decided what punctuation the sentence needed. Most settled on a period, but some said an exclamation point could be used if the sentence was in a Mother’s Day card, or even a question mark if they were in trouble with their parents.
Claypool said she hoped each board member could experience how lessons to support students with dyslexia are structured.
She noted that these lessons are explicit, direct and focused specifically on the structure of language.
Auditory and visual cues are incorporated into the lessons because a different way of teaching, such as asking students to draw in sugar, “opens a different pathway in their brain,” Claypool said.
She also explained to the board that the group of laws which comprise the “Dyslexia Supports,” signed by DeWine in January 2021, impose four main requirements.
They include universal screening for dyslexia, the establishment of the Ohio Dyslexia Committee which wrote a guidebook for curriculum and training, professional development requirements for teachers and a “multi-sensory structured literacy certification process” for what Claypool called “trainers of teachers.”
Screening for dyslexia, as required by the law, will be conducted for all kindergarten through third grade students beginning in the 2023-24 school year, and for any fourth through sixth graders, as requested by their families or teachers.
Claypool said the district already uses a screening program in its phonics program, called iReady, that was approved by the state’s Dyslexia Committee.
In response to a question from Board member Mike Perry, Claypool emphasized that students with dyslexia were getting additional help before the new legislation was approved. School officials said there have been “rumblings” of similar laws for years but there were not lobbied through until recently.
In other business:
– Superintendent Vickie Hoffman said the district’s third grade reading scores are “the best they’ve ever been.”
The district’s third grade reading proficiency is 70.5%, up from 64.7% last year, Hoffman said.
“When I got here (as superintendent), they were in the 40s,” Hoffman said, adding that Triad’s scores are “significantly higher” than some neighboring districts.