When supporting children individually, you can ensure you give tailored support specific for that child’s needs instead of having to consider the needs of others. It is an ideal situation to be in but sadly it is often an unrealistic one. Therefore it is important to plan and prepare for such events to ensure you can get the most out of the session. Before you aim to support a child in this way, you must first get to know the child, their likes/dislikes, any special requirements/IEP’s/SEN’s etc. A brief conversation with their parent or carer or, if that is not possible, their class teacher, can provide you with the right information if the right questions are asked. I have occasionally found myself assisting children from other classes that …show more content…
One child I’ve worked with quite closely was identified early on. His knowledge retention was very low, even when looking at things he was interested in such as dinosaurs and bugs. He often couldn’t remember his classmate’s names or our names and by Christmas, he still wasn’t able to identify any of the initial sounds or identify the written number form on a regular basis. It was decided to implement a regular intervention group to improve his memory as well as to speak with his parents about any additional needs that might be identified by a medical professional. We also noticed he mis-pronounced various letters which added to his confusion so I decided to create a set of letters with pictures attached to them so that he could identify the sounds easier and we could understand what letter he was trying to say. For example, c’s were often pronounced as t’s so ‘cat’ was pronounced ‘tat’ and g’s were pronounced as d’s so dog would we said ‘dod’. In order to concentrate on a single letter and try to find a word that he could pronounce correctly, I created word mats of pictures starting with a single letter and we played games of trying to guess which picture I was