CHALLENGE STRATEGIES WORKING MEMORY GENERAL CHALLENGES AND STRATEGIES

Challenge

Strategies

Working memory

• General Challenges and Strategies

  Pupils with General Learning Disability

  Encouraging the student to remember sequences of three or more numbers/items/objects. Increasing the difficulty of this task over time. Explicit practice and internal rehearsal is necessary to build this skill. Introducing the idea of visualisation can be helpful here.

• Remembering and following increasingly lengthy sets of instruction. A baseline of what a student can remember/retain is a necessary first step here. This could be contextualised with classroom instructions: e.g. ‘Put away your copy, take out your maths book and open on page 24’. Again, it is helpful to cue the student in to how they will visualise/memorise it.

• Identify missing numbers in a sequence, e.g. 1, 2, 3, _5, 6.

• Practice re-telling real life events/stories in chronological order using sequencing language of ‘first/second/next/last’.

Useful Apps:

Working Memory Trainer (Just Before) free.

Memorise, free.

Simon Sparrow’s Balloon Pop! (Chris McAulay), €0.89.

Puzzled Trains (BioExperience LLC), €0.89.

Sequencing

• Prior to listening to a story being read aloud, remind students that they will be working on their sequencing skills. Depending on your lesson, you might say, "As we read, let's think about what happens during the beginning, middle, and end of the story," or "After we finish reading, we're going to try to retell the story."

• As you read, pause frequently to ask students to identify the events in the story and to encourage them to think about when the beginning gives way to the middle and the middle transitions to the end.

• Once you have read the story, make lists with students about the events that occurred, trying to arrange them sequentially. Sentence strips or pictures work well for this type of activity, since events can be represented by either pictures or words and then put in the correct order. Let students use these lists or pictures as reminders as they retell the story by acting it out with puppets, for instance.

Independent sequencing

• Begin by reminding students that they will be working on their sequencing skills (encourage their metacognition by having them think about the skill they are going to work on).

• One strategy that may be helpful is to give students pieces of paper and pencils to use as they read. Students can write page numbers and a few words (for older students) to remind them of important events in the story. For instance, a student who is reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears in order to retell it may jot down:Goldilocks comes in--She eats the porridge--She breaks the chair--She falls asleep--The bears come home. This list doesn't tell the whole story, but it does provide the key elements, in order, and would serve as a good outline for someone wanting to retell it themselves. If this procedure is new to students, model it before asking them to do it on their own, using a read aloud story and recording your own ideas in a think aloud style to show students how to do this on their own.

• Once students have completed reading, give them opportunities to write about their stories' sequences in a reading journal, to discuss their stories with partners, or to retell them to family members for homework.
  
  

Useful Apps:

’Speech with Milo’ Sequencing (Doonan Speech Therapy) €2.69. This app is suitable for students from four to seven years. It introduces the skills of sequencing on a ‘first-next-last’ basis of increasing difficulty. Skills of retell, increasing utterance length and the development of more complex sentences.

‘Sequencing Lickity Split’ (Lickity Split Learning) €30.99. This app is focuses on the improvement of visual and auditory sequencing. It aims to do this by building the student’s memory capacity for auditory sequences of at least seven numbers. This allows for data for up to five users to be stored and updated.

Attention and Concentration

• Schedule important and demanding activities early in the day or after an extended break.

• Keep activities brief or structure them into short blocks, provide a clear beginning and end.

• Allow for regular breaks, and give the child errands that allow them to move around.

• Alternate activities between mentally demanding, and less challenging or physical ones.

• Limit information presented and present one activity or idea at a time.

• Keep instructions brief or break them down or provide a written copy.

• When giving instructions get the child's attention by calling their name and making eye contact.

• Reinforce instructions with written cues or instructions on the whiteboard.

• Minimize potential distractions - seat child at the front of class and keep their desk free of unnecessary material.

• Seat the child near the teacher or with children who will be good role models.

• Provide direct prompts to return to task and positively reinforce on-task behaviour.

• Simplify and reduce material on worksheets, and the blackboard.

• Develop and stick to a daily classroom routine.

• Emphasize the skill or concept over the quantity of work.

• Gradually increase goals.

• Ensure that tasks are meaningful to the student and are within the student’s readiness range.

• Set an alarm for short time segments.

• Using a visual timer to help maintain concentration, cue the student into how long they have left, and keep the focus of the task high. Keep a record of increasing levels of concentration (star chart etc.) to encourage students to recognise and celebrate their own progress.

Useful Apps:

Giant Timer (Benzac) Free. This timer app has clear digits, great sounds and counts down or up.

Concentration – The Attention Trainer HD (Tivola Publishing Gmbh) €2.69.

Organisation

• Help students use colour to organise their materials/copies etc. This will help in the transition to second level also.

• Have a clear calendar in the class and have students refer to it regarding upcoming events/changes etc.

• Have a clear (age appropriate) visual schedule/layout of the day that is visible to all students and is used and referred to in an interactive way throughout the day.

• Use post its/scrap paper to quickly jot down page numbers or any other details from instructions.

• Have a structured environment in class where routines are at the core of the structure, and maintained.

• Have structure within class activities. E.g. when the schedule changes to maths I will: write down the page number that teacher calls out, take out my book, take out my copy and make sure my pencil is sharp.

• Establish a baseline of student organisational skills: be clear about exactly what they experience difficulty with, and in what context.

• Explicitly teach organisational skills. Use metacognitive strategies (help the students think about their thinking). Make use of timers to help students become aware of how long tasks take them to do. Make use of checklists for organisation of materials or work: e.g. for packing a bag/getting books and copies ready for class/editing work (checking for capital letters and full stops etc.). Make use of video modelling for students to review their own performance at a particular task, assess themselves, and plan for improvement.

• Make use of concept maps/mind maps for the recording of information. This can also be useful for a pre and post look at concepts or knowledge in relation to curriculum topics taught. Enable students to use files to organise their work

Useful Apps:

What’s Today (Love Learning LLC) €1.79.

Sticky Notes for iPad (Tewks) Free.

Total Recall – Mind Map (Zyense) Free.

Processing Speed

Auditory Processing

• Encourage skills development by playing response games: use of picture cards or index cards with words/images. The student is presented with cards rapidly and has to name what they can see. This may also be modified to ask them to name the opposite to what they see. Speed of output is the goal here.

• Explicit teaching of how to rehearse information: skills on the use of visual imagery, and repeated internal rehearsal.

• Student is encouraged to rehearse material/teacher repeats information/student is asked to retell/recall material at the end of the lesson or segment.

• Students are encouraged to teach skills to each other (and reflect on what works well for them/what is difficult).

• To encourage processing with reading fluency in mind: have students read simple sentences and then respond quickly to questions with ‘yes/no’ answers.

• To encourage processing with writing fluency in mind: give students a time limit (a visual timer would be helpful here) to write simple sentences based on a stimulus.

• Direct Intervention-this involves remediation efforts to improve auditory discrimination, integration skills, associative skills and teaching specific language or academic skills. Examples include teaching the person to hear differences in sounds or words, teaching the person to pick out words in the presence of background noise, and teaching the child to use rhythm and tempo cues in speech.

• Give your student multi-level instructions (with increasing difficulty). E.g. “go to room 2, and ask Ms Harte for some blue paper”. The student will need to listen carefully to your complete instruction, and practice rehearsing the instruction. They may find it helpful to practice visual imagery alongside internal rehearsal.

• Play a guessing game by giving him clues to an item that you have thought of and see how many clues he needs to guess the item correctly. You could do this while playing “I Spy” or simply by hiding items around the classroom/yard and having him hunt for them.

• Try playing the “Silly or Not Silly” game by saying a sentence and asking your student to label it “silly” or “not silly.” For example, you could say, “The mop cooked spaghetti and meatballs for the canary.” (Silly - of course!) This can be done in a quick fire round.

• The student with auditory processing difficulties must be taught and encouraged to use strategies to cope with and compensate for deficit areas. For example, homework instructions could be taped, the person could be taught how to ask for repetition of things not heard or understood, and the use of visual cues to complement what is heard can be taught.

Useful Apps:

Auditory Processing Studio (Virtual Speech Center Inc) €26.99. This app was created by a speech and language pathologist for children aged seven and upwards who experience auditory processing difficulties. It incorporates a bottom up approach which focuses on the improvement of auditory processing through auditory discrimination and phonological awareness activities. It allows for the introduction of background noise to help children practice skills in a noisy environment.

Behaviour

• Ensure that tasks are manageable and at the correct level for the student.

• Use observation to have a clear picture of what the exact difficulty is for the student – and what possible triggers are.

• Involve the student in the information gathering process: their views on why this behaviour is becoming problematic.

• Begin with relatively easy tasks, and use specific praise e.g. “I really like the way you finished those three sentences, and came up to show me your work, fantastic!” Use an agreed reward system that gives concrete feedback to the student that they are achieving.

Cognitive Ability

Being aware of student’s cognitive ability level, as well as their individual profile of strengths and needs is vital to ensure good differentiation. Using techniques and strategies that build upon existing strengths is a good starting point.

Ability to Generalise

• Provide lots of opportunities (with different materials/pictures and in different contexts) for students to practice the skills they have been explicitly taught.

Sensory (overload)

• Take a sensory/environmental inventory of all the possible demands on a student. Involve the student where possible – as they may be able to identify what are the most difficult aspects for them.

• Use information from this inventory to minimise sensory distractions/difficulties.