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This guide is intended to be used with the storybook A Nasty Dose of the Yawns
, an escapade where the main character has significant difficulties with literacy. The story is fun and adventurous and is likely to appeal to children of approximately 8–12 years old. It also highlights some of the issues faced by learners who find literacy unusually difficult. This includes the practical challenges of struggling to read and write in a society that takes adult literacy for granted. In addition, the psychological impacts of struggling to achieve a skill that most children acquire with relative ease are explored.
A Note on the Language Used in this Guide
A Nasty Dose of the Yawns
is set in Year 6 of a primary school. The content of this guidebook is therefore most suitable for individuals of approximately 11 years of age, and the term ‘child’ has been predominantly used throughout the guide rather than ‘young person’. However, many of the strategies would also be relevant to pupils in the first few years of secondary school.
It is acknowledged that children with literacy difficulties may find it difficult to read A Nasty Dose of the Yawns
independently as it contains a wide range of vocabulary to hold the interest of older readers. However, it could be accessed through paired reading, or adults could read the story to children who do not yet have the skills to read it themselves. To aid children who find reading laborious, the story is shorter than other tales in the Adventures with Diversity series.
The language used to discuss neurodiversity and literacy difficulties is continually evolving. Therefore, readers are advised to keep up to date with any changes in terminology.
Synopsis of A Nasty Dose of the Yawns
Zack is an 11-year-old boy who finds school challenging due to being dyslexic. As a younger pupil, he was renowned for his anger, which was a consequence of repeatedly failing at literacy tasks. However, his Year 3 teacher, Miss Hazel, recognises that his troublesome behaviour was a response to his difficulties with learning and she teaches him strategies to help him to make progress and to manage his frustrations. The story begins on a sunny morning during Creative Arts Week, with Miss Hazel (who now teaches Year 6) planning fun activities for the day. Unfortunately, Zack is at the hospital that morning having his hearing checked.
Miss Hazel is unaware that an ancient, hairy creature called an ofsted has been living in the back of her art cupboard. The ofsted is accidentally brought out into the class in a bundle of tissue paper. While attempting to escape back to the cupboard, he shakes his long fur and covers the class in a strange yellow powder. This infects the whole class with a serious sleeping sickness, from which he has been suffering for many years. He scuttles unseen back to his hiding place, while the class falls into a deep sleep. Meanwhile, Zack has had a long wait for his hearing appointment and then witnesses an unpleasant encounter between his mother and Traffic Officer Simms, who tows away her car, because she was unable to read the parking signs and so parked in the wrong place.
The headteacher is horrified to find the whole of Year 6 in a coma and is desperate to deal with the problem discreetly, to prevent panic among the parents and pupils. She calls on the unctuous Dr Bling from the health centre next to the school, and together they try to solve the mystery and make a plan to manage the situation.
Zack returns to school in a black mood and is surprised to find that his friends are unconscious and, for the moment, no adults are in sight. With some quick thinking, an encounter with a slug and a bit of luck, he establishes that the mystery illness is caused by the yellow dust that has settled over the class. He carefully hoovers this up and, in doing so, revives the class. As a result, it appears that the headteacher and Dr Bling were involved in a strange hoax when they call the emergency services. Zack secretly empties the yellow dust from the vacuum cleaner into a bag and takes it home.
He decides to take revenge on Traffic Officer Simms by giving him a box of chocolates (having injected a small quantity of the yellow dust into the centre of each chocolate). The plan has a much greater impact than Zack intended, as Traffic Officer Simms feels obliged to share the chocolates with his colleagues and all 19 traffic wardens are rendered unconscious for several weeks. The incident stimulates Zack to develop an interest in chemistry and he trains as a doctor as he matures. He experiments on the yellow dust and develops a radical new sleeping pill that is used to help people who are recovering from accidents and operations. When asked how he developed his medication, he explains that it was with the help of three slugs and a traffic warden, but the details of the story remain his secret forever.
The Main Messages in the Story
- Difficulties with literacy are common. They can cause significant frustration, low self-esteem and academic underperformance.
- Children may demonstrate challenging behaviour as a way of distracting from their difficulties or as a means of venting their frustration.
- Dyslexics often feel that others make judgements about their intelligence based on their literacy difficulties. Therefore, when their problems with literacy are highlighted in public, they may feel embarrassed and foolish.
- However, children with literacy difficulties may have a range of strengths in other areas. It is important to provide opportunities for them to show these strengths.
- Adults can really help by recognising the difficulties and providing support. Good levels of assistance often significantly reduce the negative emotional consequences of dyslexia.
- There are lots of ways to support children who find literacy difficult and most people learn strategies to overcome the majority of their issues.
- Modern technology provides many ways to help learners with literacy difficulties.
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It is estimated that human speech developed approximately 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. The ability to speak is believed to be an inborn function of the brain, like walking and breathing (Milne, 2005). However, reading and writing are much more recent inventions. Writing is about 4,000 years old and the human brain has not had time to evolve so that it acquires these skills naturally (Milne, 2005). As recently as 1820, it is estimated that only approximately 53% of the British population over the age of 14 were able to read and write (Roser & Ortiz-Ospina, 2018). Reading is not a skill that just develops as we mature; it is an artificial process that takes the brain many years to properly acquire. There are many underlying cognitive skills that are required to successfully learn to read and write, and it usually takes about a decade of practice to ensure swift automatic word recognition. Therefore, it is not surprising that some people have difficulties learning to read.
Learning to read and write in English may be particularly challenging because many of the words are not spelt in the way that they are pronounced. The same sound may be spelt in many different ways – e.g. ‘rain’, ‘reign’ and ‘rein’. Alternatively, the same letters may be pronounced in many different ways. For instance, consider the different ways that the letters ‘ou’ are pronounced in the following words: ‘flour’, ‘through’, ‘though’, ‘thought’, ‘borough’ and ‘hiccough’. This makes English significantly more complicated than languages such as Spanish, Italian and German where the words are usually spelt as they sound. In these languages, learners may be more likely to show issues with reading fluency and grammar, whereas spelling is a more frequent problem in English.
Some Causes of Literacy Difficulties
Children may experience difficulties with literacy for a range of reasons including the following:
- problems with eyesight
- issues with hearing
- poor educational opportunities
- general difficulties with learning
- speech and language difficulties, limited vocabulary or poor pronunciation
- English as an additional language
- poor levels of literacy among parents/carers
- lack of access to books/written text at home
- specific difficulties with literacy/dyslexia.
Many children swiftly overcome early troubles with literacy. For instance, children who have limited access to books at home often make rapid progress when they start school. However, some children experience specific difficulties with literacy that prove to be persistent despite appropriate intervention. This is often described as dyslexia. This is the case with Zack, the main character in A Nasty Dose of the Yawns .
Estimates of the prevalence of dyslexia vary, but it has been proposed that approximately 10% of the population have mild dyslexia and about 4% have more severe difficulties with literacy (Crisfield, 1996). Hence, it is likely that all schools, and most classes, will have some children who have difficulties with literacy.
Specific Difficulties with Literacy/Dyslexia
Persistent specific difficulties with literacy, often called dyslexia, are perhaps the most well known and most prevalent of all educational difficulties. There is no doubt that some children find learning to read and write more difficult than would be expected given their intelligence and school experience (Elliott & Grigorenko, 2014). Many people think that dyslexic learners have a distinct pattern of difficulties. However, despite a huge amount...
