Tixlers Letters provide tools for you to teach the foundations of literacy. These foundations are automatic and legible handwriting, automatic and efficient reading, and automatic and correct spelling.
One of us, Cathy, has tutored students with diagnosed dyslexia and / or dysgraphia for several years, and these products grew out of her need for effective and efficient tools to help her students.
The first of these products was the cursive handwriting deck. Produced on durable card stock, it has texturing on the letters and visual and tactile cues for the points where students start, slow down to change direction, and stop. These cards enable you to visual, audio, kinesthetic, and tactile multi-sensory instruction to help your students learn to write automatically. We chose cursive for our first deck because our goal was to help students with dysgraphia, and cursive addresses most of the problems that dysgraphic students have. Shop Tixlers Traceable Cursive Letters Decks
Our next products were the phonics decks. These have phonograms, blends, prefixes, and suffixes. These decks are available in the Tixlers cursive font, and a font comparable to D’Nelian. They have texturing, so you can use them for visual, audio, kinesthetic, and tactile instruction. They also have a color coding, so that you can find the card(s) you need more rapidly. We have found that when a student figures out the coding, she has pretty nearly mastered the phonics concepts. Shop Tixlers Phonics Decks
The textured handwriting and phonics decks have a significant advantage over the non-textured cards, such as the LTK cards. When your students first learn the letters or phonics concepts, they can reinforce their learning by tracing. The tactile feedback ensures that their practice doesn’t reinforce bad habits, such as mis-forming the letters.
These products helped make the tutoring sessions with students effective and efficient. So much so that the next opportunity for products became obvious – we created the phonics and morphology products. Once dyslexic students have mastered the consonants, short and long vowels, vowel pairs, diphthongs, and consonant blends, the common prefixes and suffixes, and the spelling rules, they have to tackle the morphological aspects of English.
The phonics and morphology decks are available in teachers’ and students’ editions. The difference is that the teachers’ edition has word lists and other information about the phonics or morphology concept on the back of each card. The students’ edition cards are blank on the back, so that your students can write rules, meanings, key words, or other mnemonic aids on the back of each concept’s card. In addition to the cards, we developed a teachers aid – a booklet with the back of each of card in the teachers’ edition, and reproducible pages for recording your students’ progress. Shop Tixlers Phonics and Morphology Products
We created latin and greek roots games to challenge your students to match the roots with the meanings, reinforcing their memory for the roots and semantics. We also created the morphology magnets so that you can teach the morphological structure of words.
Our products teach the foundations – handwriting, reading, and spelling – of literacy, so that the students can learn the high level literacy skills, such as reading for meaning and writing essays, in classes with their peers.
Our backgrounds have provided the foundations for developing these products for effective and efficient tutoring. In academic and employment situations, we have learned about Orton-Gillingham tutoring, dyslexia and dysgraphia remediation, Montessori education, and public school teaching of Math, Science, and Technology. We apply our expertise in engineering, mathematics, computers, linguistics, and psychology to the development process. We gratefully acknowledge the concept of textured handwriting instruction, as taught by Maria Montessori’s 1914 patent (expired).