Eccentric wrote:
I am interested to know how other members help their SpLD young people to study and revise more effectively. My Dd with dyslexia studies long and hard but ineffectively. For example I discovered this morning that she intended to spend the day inputting French Vocab into Quizlet when there are already 10's of complete vocab lists for the exam GCSE exam body that her school uses already with open access for her to use. It took me a good 10 minutes to persuade her that they were good enough. She looks for perfection and will use perfection as a way of procrastinating. How do others get SpLD YP to focus on what actually matters like exam style practice questions and what is actually a helpful way for dyslexics to revise?
For a start, my DD made a german vocab quizlet in a very short space of time by copying and pasting from the official AQA vocab list, so it shouldn’t have taken her all day to do the French one. However, depending on how she inputted the words into quizlet, you might find that it was a means of revising the words in its own right.
My DD had issues with biology. She knew the stuff, but was struggling to answer the questions in the way she needed to to get the marks. She also didn’t want to sit and write down the answers either, so I offered to sit with her and ask her the questions, while I had the mark scheme in front of me. The key was I ‘offered ’ though, I didn’t insist. After the first session she agreed it made sense and was helpful, so we did another couple of sessions. Given the grade she got it obviously worked. It’s tricky to do this with every single subject though, as it does need time.
We did try and get her to do papers, but she didn’t really want to. There’s only so much you can do. Hopefully the school are getting her to do papers, so maybe more at home is to much of the same. At this stage it’s for mock exams and it’s a learning experience of what works and doesn’t for her tbh.
Dyslexia and perfectionism are two different issues though. (I’m dyslexic myself). As a student I preferred to do past papers rather than read through stuff and take notes. That’s what worked for me. However I don’t need to have everything perfect.