Ribeiro, L. 1 , Mateus, S. 2 , Lapa, S. 2 & Sacadura, C. 2
1 Special Educational professional and Master degree on learning disabilities CADIn Estrada da Malveira, Edifício CADIn 2750, Cascais, PORTUGAL
2 Special Educational professional CADIn Estrada da Malveira, Edifício CADIn 2750, Cascais, PORTUGAL
The SLD field in Portugal has shown a slow evolution. However, parents and teachers recognize this group of children, the government doesn?t recognize them. Therefore, many families look for private centers, like CADIn, for identification, assessment, and intervention. CADIn is a non-for profit institution, privately funded, with the goal of providing the best clinical care, teaching and research in the field of developmental disabilities. Cadin team also is interesting in developing intervention materials adequate to the development of basic skills that are essential for the reading and writing success, like phonological assessment. In 2012 our second game started to be commercialized, it is named Safari dos sons (Sounds Safari), we consider it a material of high quality to phonological awareness training, and a essential area to be part of an intervention plan for children with reading and writing specific learning disabilities, as Lyon, Shaywitz and Shaywitz, (2003) refer the typical disabilities in students with dyslexia usually reflect deficits in the phonological component of language. In this game are included exercises with rimming, segmentation, blending and manipulation of syllables and phonemes in an increasing degree of difficulty, and that can shape the needs of each student. All these exercises are made in an enjoyable and fun way, with reinforcements when the child achieves success. In antecedent studies, we?ve made, the results have shown that our instruction focus on academic problems (73.5% - 47% on reading, 25.9% on writing, and 0.6% on mathematics), and phonological awareness problems (89.6%), the improvement is seen in all areas above 75% in phonological awareness, above 50% in other fields. We intent to present the preliminary results of a single-subject design study investigating the effects of using safari dos sons on the training of phonological awareness.