Calling all primary or SEN teachers - How do you teach months of the year and seasons???

[wonderstuff]

I'm a secondary teacher. I have a really dyslexic pupil, asked him if he knew months, he wasn't sure, turns out although he knows all the names and the order, he doesn't know that January is the start of the year, when christmas is or what the weather is like during each month. Can anyone recommend any games I can use to teach him?

This is hard, because he's too old for the My First Calendar magnetic set with the seasons and so on.

In his SEN time, or even as part of a whole class activity, I would get him to make his own calendar using a (free) software package and maybe some digital photographs with appropriate nature/weather scenes, and enter crucial dates onto it, such as Easter 2009, Xmas, family birthdays, school events and so on. He could then print a copy off and spiral bind it for himself for use at school, and a copy for his parents for an Xmas present.

Does that sound promising?

Sounds great, a little project for our sen time Your so clever boffin

You're so clever even

I find that dyslexic pupils also struggle with the order of the months in the middle - so use mnemonics such as JASON (Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct,Nov)
In fact try & get him to think of his own silly sentence for all of the months - he could then illustrate it with silly pics

Yes that would be good too. He keeps missing Oct from the months and L out of the alphabet. I'm newish to SEN so keen to hear all ideas

How i was taught the months of the year was too put your hands together knuckles next to knuckles and start at the beg of the left hand and 1st knuckle is Jan, dip is feb and so on. It also teaches that knuckles are 31 days in month and dips are 30.

It doesn't make sense written down but try it and you will see what i mean

Hope this helps. Taught my children the months of the year this way.

For the alphabet I used 'Little Mice Nibble Old Peas' as my pupil kept missing out N - drew a cartoon to illustrate too

(I'm a secondary TA doing a dyslexia teaching cert!)

Mum, my December was 3rd knuckle of my right hand using your technique.

Heh?

Cheers for compliment, wonderstuff!

mrsmaidamess, yes sorry should have said you don't use all the knuckles up so are left with one spare. But it does teach you the months of the year and the days of the month.

So the alphabet and months are going well, lmnop was an issue, so we are using little mice never organise parties! But I'm at a lose as to how to help them remember uvwxyz the V and x seem to be an issue. Any ideas??

Hi Wonderstuff - I'm a Y5/6 teacher so tried to pick ideas which would be grown up enough for KS3... Here's what I came up with:
For a dyslexic child in my class, a specialist taught me some spelling techniques which you could apply to this section of the alphabet. Colour chunking seems to work for her - for the word (or section of the alphabet in question), give the children a selection of colours. They choose which colours to use for which letter(s), and write it out in the same order (same colours for same letters) lots of times. So for example, writing uvwxyz with the letters together as a word, they choose blue for uv, orange for wx, green for y and purple for z. They keep writing it like that. The theory is that when they come to remember/re-write that word or section, they picture the colours in order and their brain remembers the shape of the letter in the colour.

Mnemonics are always a winner I agree, especially if they come up with the phrase. But I agree that's a challenge for uvwxyz!

Hey just a thought - if it's just which comes first the v or the x, could they think that v stands for very (very large) and x for x-large? (i.e. the size increases) That's the way my brain works!