Than Hsiang Kindergarten - Workshop with BOLD

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Madam Ivy Loo

Have you ever met a child who has learning disabilities? Or kids with behavioural and emotional difficulties? Chances are you have met special children with dyslexia, ADD or ADHD. As part of the continuous development programme of the Than Hsiang Kindergarten Teachers, a one-day workshop was held in Than Hsiang Kindergarten (Bayan Lepas) on 20 June 2009. All teachers from Than Hsiang Kindergartens (Bayan Lepas, Sg Ara, Bukit Mertajam and Sg Petani) attended the event, along with the participation of several Ai Xin Mama.

Mr. Tan Kien Hooi, a Literacy Intervention Coordinator with Bureau on Learning Difficulties (BOLD) was the facilitator of the workshop. Mr. Tan graduated with a Masters degree in Special Education from Australia and had been a social worker in a Sydney orphanage prior to his current position.

The main objectives of the workshop were to increase the awareness, knowledge and understanding of children with signs of reading disabilities at pre-school level.

Teachers were first briefed on the principal characteristics of the various learning disorders, namely dyslexia, ADD (attention deficit disorder) and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder) with the former being the main focus of the workshop. Dyslexia is synonymous to reading disabilities. It was estimated that a significant proportion of children (70 – 80%) with learning disorders have reading deficiency. This disability may affect parts or the entire reading processes that include the difficulty with word (or character for Chinese language) recognition, reading rate, reading comprehension and word decoding. Some basic indicators when a child is having dyslexia include the difficulty to separate words into their different sounds (or intonation for Chinese language) and the difficulty in matching letter combination for a specific sound.

In order to enable the teachers to experience learning difficulty (as faced by a person with dyslexia), some activities were initiated. These included memory test by using flash cards and the ability to correlate symbols with characters. The goal is to make the teachers aware of the challenges faced by these children because to them, characters are merely symbols without meaning.

In addition, the participants were also divided into groups to work out strategies that may help these special children. These include relating words with pictures [particularly for Chinese characters, eg. for the character (泪), it was associated as water (水) and eye (目)], associating Chinese character with sound and pronounciation, increasing basic word bank and inculcating the ability to describe a situation or a scene.

Prior to the conclusion of the workshop, the participants used the opportunity to ask the workshop facilitator numerous questions that they are facing during their work in the classrooms. Everyone learnt and benefited tremendously from this Q&A session. All the teachers and Ai Xin mama left the workshop with a greater understanding of the subject matter.

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