Mastery versus learning Mastery goes beyond learning. What we traditionally call learning often happens without truly understanding what you have learnt. When a picture thinker learns this way the learning normally doesn’t stick well in their memory. Mastery on the other hand, is for example what you do when you learn to ride a bicycle. When you have mastered the skill of bicycle riding, it will stay with you for the rest of your life. As literacy is a skill we need to aquire for life, this is obviously an important difference. We clearly need to master the letters of the Alphabet as well as the spelling of the most common words in the language. Trigger-words About 75% of all we read - whatever we are reading - is made up of what we calltrigger-words. These are the most common words in the language and we call them trigger-words because they tend to break the focus of a dyslexic person. The reason is that the dyslexic uses the meaning of the word in their thinking process - and the meaning of the trigger-words does not translate easily into a picture. Mastery of the trigger-words consists essentially of discovering their exact meaning and translating that into an image. We use plasticine for making the image clear and specific and then anchor it into our long-term memory using our unique focusing tool. Training of your support person By the end of the 30 hour programme, the client has normally already experienced a significant change in self-esteem and the areas that he/whe decided to focus on, whether it is reading or spelling. A support person of their choice has received a three hour training in supporting with using the tools the client now has aquired. This now needs to be put to use by doing specific follow-up work which normally takes about 50 hours. If the client decides to commit 1 hour weekly to this work it should be finished within a year. The follow-up work is imperative to the success of the programme, as the learning difficulty has not been permanently conquered until this work is done. If this work is not done there is a risk of the benefits experienced within the 30 hour one-to-one work fading away within a year or two.. When a client is in education, we encourage as much involvement from school as possible - even though the success of the programme does not rely on this. An example of a trigger word definition from a dictionary: a or A (a) indefinite_article 1 one; one kind of [I'll bake a peach pie.] 2 any one [Pick a peach from the tree.] 3 for each [The apples cost two dollars a bag.] Use a before a word that begins with a consonant sound. Use an before a word that begins with a vowel sound. Below is a photo of a model from http://www.symbolmastery.com, where you can find a great number of samples of what people have created when mastering trigger-words. Just remember that YOUR model needs to represent YOUR image. Otherwise we can not guarantee that your model represents your full understanding of the word. one; one kind of [Here is a ball] |