An alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology-Madras has decided to start a specialised online class for children with dyslexia to make up for their academic loss during COVID-19 lockdown.
D Chandrasekhar, a metallurgy and material engineering graduate, founded Madras Dyslexia Association to help the children. However, he felt the progress the students made will go waste with the suspension of classroom teaching due to lockdown.
"We are launching a new initiative to help children with learning disabilities. We will leverage the ubiquitous internet and computer to have engaging live online sessions that teach students with dyslexia in unique ways. These sessions aim to build ground-up - from pre-skills to essential skills to read, write (English and Tamil) and study effectively and is intended for children enrolled in classes 2-7," Chandrashekhar said.
"The language skills programs (both English and Tamil) approach the subject holistically-going from sounds of letters, reading words as whole words or using techniques like syllabication, meaningful reading of phrases and sentences, building vocabulary, going onto comprehension, analysis and finally making inferences,” he added.
The association has also come up with an "Avaz Reader" paving way to become an engaged independent reader.
"Catching-up with school's academic needs and bridging academic gaps if any, would build the child's self-esteem and also enhance his/her interest in academic activities. The threat posed to a child can be turned into an opportunity to learn smart.
"The skill of writing builds up from building ability to write grammatically and semantically correct sentences to ideating and writing coherent paragraphs. The ‘Study Smart’ program, develops essential skills such as categorization, organization visualization and verbalization and then develop and use of graphical organisers to learn a specific content, retain it and express it in written form,” he added.
Universities and schools across the country have been closed since March 16 when the Centre announced a countrywide classroom shutdown as one of the measures to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.
Later, a 21-day nationwide lockdown was announced on March 24, which came into effect the next day. It has now been extended till May 31.