POPAT and Special Educational Needs

It is widely recognized that nowadays many children come into school with immature language development. They have poor attention control and cannot listen: or if they do listen, they cannot remember what they have been asked to do. Frequently these children struggle with literacy.

Children start school very young and the majority have spent their short lives in a noisy environment. There is too much sensory stimulation by way of television; their toys; their families; their activities and their nurseries and play-groups and often not nearly enough quiet one to one conversation. Some of these children have inborn language difficulties and fail to make themselves understood or miss out the small grammatical words.

POPAT is quiet and gentle. It starts by asking children to listen to small sounds and pick them out from among others. It goes on to quickly forge permanent links between speech sounds and letters. Later still it makes clear the phonemic structure of words at which point four and five year old children will write spontaneously.

At every stage it ensures that each child progresses at his or her own pace and does not fail. Because the programme has detailed steps it reveals those children who find a step difficult to take and provides for the teacher to give the most beneficial assistance with supplementary games and exercises.

In this way it allows children whose difficulties were caused by not being able to focus their listening attention to progress normally: those who have general learning difficulties to progress normally but more slowly and those with specific learning disability to be assisted with literacy at any or every stage.


POPAT for the Multi- Sensory Impaired.   Click here