Friday, September 21, 2018

Auditory discrimination


Auditory discrimination is the ability to recognise differences between sounds. Particularly, auditory discrimination allows people to distinguish between phonemes in words. Phonemes are the smallest parts of sound in any given language.


Phonological awareness is often referred to as phonemic awareness, but there is a crucial difference between these terms. 

The term ‘phonemic awareness’ comes from the word ‘phoneme’, which is a single sound in language.   This includes the following individual skills:

·        Identification of initial, final and medial sounds in word
·        Segmentation (breaking words into individual sounds)
·        Blending (blending individual sounds to make words)
·        Phoneme transposition (ability to ‘swap’ sounds)

The term ‘phonological awareness’ comes from the word ‘phonology’, which is the sounds and sound patterns of language.  Phonological awareness is therefore a broader term than phonemic awareness and encompasses the following:
All of the above aspects of phonemic awareness   PLUS
·        Onset + rime
·        Rhyme
·        Syllabification
·        Word Retrieval
·        Auditory discrimination


Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Visual Sequential Memory


Visual Sequential Memory is the ability to remember visual details in the correct sequence.
  • This is essential for spelling and reading, where your child needs to remember the sequence of letters in order to spell the word correctly.
  • When doing multiple digit addition and subtraction, visual sequential memory is essential to help your child copy the numbers in the correct order.



Visual sequential memory is the ability to remember forms (including shape, orientation, size, and colour) or characters in the correct order. This skill is particularly important in spelling. Missing, added or jumbled letters within words are common for people who struggle with this skill, and they will often whisper or talk aloud as they write. Recognising and remembering patterns may also be a problem.
Improved sequential memory can help improve your child’s reading skills. To do this effectively, both auditory sequential and visual sequential memory skills need to be developed. Auditory sequential and visual sequential memory skills are the ability to remember things seen and heard in sequence. This plays an important role in learning to remember the difference between words such as on and no and being able to complete tasks in the order they were given.
This is not only vital for reading, but for spelling and mathematics as well. As you can imagine, saying 91 + 1 or 19 + 1 , spelling t-a-r instead of r-a-t, or reading dog instead of god could completely change the meaning of a situation.