Dyslexia support teaching

I can help your child to reach their full potential at school

I offer individual tuition for children from the age of 5 to help them overcome the challenges to learning and communication arising from dyslexia, Aspergers, dyspraxia and a wide variety of other complex difficulties.
Based on over 20 years of experience, my approach is to develop a personalised learning schedule for every learner which is tailored to their needs, and which is adapted in response to their progress. My aim is to work alongside families and school so that, together, we can establish the solid building blocks that will allow the learner to achieve in their learning and reach their full potential.

I believe that perceptual skills are key to learning. I focus on developing these skills. A typical teaching strategy will begin with recognising the basic sound structure of words. We will then progress to sentence construction, building grammatical awareness, often making up ‘silly sentences’ from random words but in a set grammatical pattern. I make time to talk and have fun, thereby building confidence, and don’t move on until the learning associated with any one area is fully consolidated.
I have an excellent range of specialist teaching resources and equipment, many of which are multi-sensory to help enhance concentration, interest, enjoyment and memory skills.
This will also be giving the foundation for a love of learning, allowing the learner to achieve. Having first trained as a Montessori teacher, I then studied with the Hornsby International Dyslexia Centre and hold a number of teaching and assessment qualifications from Dyslexia Action. My most recent training has being the study of ‘Structured, Cumulative Multisensory Tuition for Learners with Dyslexia’. I work in a primary school where I have attended many county based training sessions. I am also CRB Enhanced Disclosure checked #001143271642

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Contact details

Here are some examples of the multisensory activities I use in lessons:

A typical lesson will start with revision of newly learnt sounds, then consolidation by going over the sound cards they have made.

Formation of new sounds learnt using sand tray

Making up consonant-vowel-consonant words using the letters

Reading a sentence and cutting up to remake the sentence

Self correcting exercise for phonics, comprehension and grammer

Chute game for a variety of language activties

Moving onto a more advanced stage of learning: the long vowel sounds. Using the story mountain board, learners set the scene with the objects, choose ‘story word cards’ and go onto make their own story book. The visual use of the story board gives structure to the narrative writing, from the opening, building up to the peak and finally on to the resolution and ending.

Narrating assembled story from the 'Story mountain'

Part of our lesson will consist of the development of perceptual skills, these are of prime importance for learning.

Matching cubes- These cubes improve different skills such as visual memory and spatial reasoning, dexterity of thumb and finger and pattern matching on each card. In another game of visual memory, the child looks at the picture for 5 seconds then it is hidden and they recreate the pattern with coloured sticks from memory

Testimonials

I have been fortunate to work with many young learners over the years. Here are some comments from the parents:

Our eldest son was having trouble concentrating at school when he was 5½, owing to what was later diagnosed as mild dyspraxia. We’d only recently moved to the area but a request for local recommendations was swiftly answered with a deluge of recommendations for Daphne Blakey. Within minutes of our first encounter he was at ease and relished the prospect of the various learning games that Daphne has in her array of tools and props. Either my wife or I stayed with him for his first few sessions but it was quickly evident that Daphne had a knack for keeping him focussed and engrossed. Within a couple of months school reported big improvements in Harvey’s concentration, and we noticed it at home too.
Fast forward to today; he is now 7 ½ and absolutely thriving at school, regularly getting top scores for his Maths and English and is generally happy and stimulated. Not to be outdone by his brother, our younger son joined Daphne when he was 4. We started with smaller 30min sessions anticipating that this might be enough for his attention span, but he asked to stay longer after the second session and he’s been doing an hour per week ever since. School, not knowing that he’d started with Daphne, asked whether something had changed at home as they noticed big improvements in his numeracy and letter formation – and that neatly confirmed for us that it was worth the investment in spite of his age. Daphne is highly qualified and draws on a wealth of experience, resulting in a style that blends modern techniques with a supportive, traditional teaching ethos. Her particular specialty is helping kids with dyslexia but her help with our boys has nonetheless been invaluable. We couldn’t recommend Daphne more strongly – drop me a line if I can help with more info.
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jamie@wildferment.co.uk
CEO
Daphne has such a lovely way with children, and has built up a fantastic mutually respectful relationship with our son since she began tutoring him a few years ago. Since our son has been working with Daphne his understanding and confidence have improved greatly. Daphne makes every lesson relevant to our son’s school curriculum and helps to build on what he learns at school, we feel our son particularly benefits from Daphne’s use of different approaches in the lesson, combining reading and writing with different hands on activities and games. Daphne is brilliant, kind, approachable, supportive and incredibly knowledgeable. I would recommend Daphne to absolutely everyone, we wouldn’t be without her.
Ashley & Will
Daphne tutored our daughter for several years in both Maths and English. Not every child can learn by conventional teaching methods which is where Daphne’s skills are so valuable. She has a variety of games and tools that help a child that is struggling. Daphne understood exactly how to teach our daughter in an engaging way. She used visual teaching methods that helped our daughter grasp and understand new concepts that she was struggling with in school. Our daughter always looked forward to going and her reading age quickly improved. I cannot recommend Daphne highly enough.
Simon & Leigh
My son attended Mrs Blakey’s for 3 years then my daughter. In this time they were provided with a learning environment that was tailored to suit their individual learning needs with the kind, supportive and knowledge from Mrs Blakey that has given them confidence and educational support the school could not offer.
Amanda & Charles