"Stop Dyslexia Now" BLOG for primary school teachers.

For three years Olive Hickmott and Andrew Bendefy worked with adults and children to develop their powers of 'Visualisation' and use their brain the way it seems nature intended. They worked with those with spelling, reading, writing difficulties, including dyslexic tendencies, and also mathematics, languages and most areas of learning; the processes also enables individuals to improve memory skills and their self-esteem, confidence and success.

Andrew and Olive subsequently worked with parents and teachers to help adults and children and now regularly see amazing results. For any parent or someone involved in learning, education and health, these processes of 'Visualisation' integrate so well with existing teaching methods and they do give us all another tool, a new choice for growth and development to achieve new goals.


Summary of the work:
1. Teaching people to visualise - almost everyone can because they know what their mothers, fathers, children look like. They learnt this at about 6 weeks old, but like any other skill if it is infrequently used it does not develop. So we teach individuals to use and develop the visualisation skill that they already have. If you practice using it to visualise a cat for example, you can, with a little practice, develop it to see different coloured cats, different views etc. Now this is a skill that is already very useful for anyone trying to draw a picture from memory, imagine a different situation or get in touch with a previous experience.

2. Using Visualisation for words: The best spellers spell by seeing words in front of them and copying down the letters. When you are an exceptional speller this can be so fast you do not notice. But some people don't realise that they can use this internal imagery for words. So we teach them how they can do that once they have managed to see their visualised pictures somewhere in front of them. We also teach them how they can improve their memory by recalling pictures of what they have read.

3. Dealing with Bewildering: This part of the book is specifically for those dyslexics who have symptoms such as letters jumping around or falling off the page and end up feeling "bewildering". We have documented a simple way that individuals can change this experience and hence reduce this interference to normal learning; we are also finding really simple ways that can work especially with younger children in seconds!

In the book we mention the number of exceptionally well known people who are dyslexic (as documented on the British dyslexia association web-site). In our experience many of those we meet are very bright before they meet words,
and the book explains exactly how this is able to be true.

In February 2006 Andrew and Olive published the book Seeing Spells Achieving that shares all their processes, work and findings in a very simple step by step approach. They now run regular workshops and 1 day 'Train the Trainer' accreditation courses which have been attended by delegates from the UK, Holland and even Australia.

They have trained countless parents, 130 teachers, introduced ongoing programmes in 7 schools in Hertfordshire, they work with 2 departments at the University of Hertfordshire and they run 1-day 'Train the Trainer' workshops to share their learnings and support the demand for their work. They have spoken at the 2006 East of England Mentoring conference and they have had students from as far afield as Australia and Holland attend their training - yes it works in any language and its great for anyone who is speaking English as a 2nd language.

Since writing the book a number of new ideas have come to light that we would like to share with you here. Some of them have been contributed by those we have worked with and we are delighted to be able to share those too.