by Sarah Major M.Ed.
It helps to understand ahead of time what will be hard for struggling readers to do. After working with children who have trouble learning for several years and taking the time to consider what they have in common, I have compiled a list of skills that are hard for them. It is important to bear in mind that commonly the children who have trouble learning to read are visual and/or kinesthetic children.
This is significant because visual/kinesthetic children have specific learning strengths that we cannot ignore and expect them to learn easily. My rule of thumb is that if teaching the traditional way doesn’t work for a child, look for signs of the child being a visual or kinesthetic learner. And then I change my approach fundamentally, including going from whole to part. An easy way to do this is to start with sight words before tackling phonics. I know, I know. That might sound like a huge no no, but please bear with me.
Specific skills that struggling readers have trouble with:
The following areas are not going to all hold true for all struggling readers, but they are skills that crop up most frequently.
Struggling readers may:
1. Not be auditory at all. So this means that telling them what a word says and even teaching a little lesson in which they write the word and read the word aloud many times might not result in learning. Doing this sort of thing will take up a lot of time and will leave both of you more discouraged than before. So don’t rely on words to teach them with the expectation of great results.
2. Need hooks for remembering. One of the best connections between words and meaning I’ve found is pictures. This is because a picture is captured instantly. It doesn’t have to be explained. It’s instant. A word embedded in an image that shows the meaning of the word is magical to these children. For a visual learner, images are everything.
3. Benefit from gestures that match the learning concept. When you give kinesthetic or tactile learners a gesture or body motion, they have a body hook to memory and this makes all the difference for them.
4. Have trouble handling a lot of details while learning. If a child struggles to read, it is likely that giving him a lot of rules to follow for deciphering a word will stand in his way rather than helping him out. It is more likely that he will do much better being taught the whole word if it is embedded in a picture. Once he can get used to viewing the word as an image rather than as a string of letters, he will improve. Once he can recognize the word, then you can teach phonics skills that pertain to the word. If you are working with a visual learner, it is great to know that these children learn best from whole to part and not the other way around. (Whole words and then letter sequence, for example).
5. Be shaky on basic letter sounds. The most basic building blocks for words are sounds. If a child is shaky on sounds, this will frequently create a stumbling block to learning to read. The most common culprits are vowel sounds. It is essential that they know their sounds well. When I work with struggling readers, I always check their knowledge of vowel sounds first.
6. Mix up the sequence of letters in words. Struggling readers aren’t aware of the patterns in our language. They view each word as an unique in the vast ocean of words in our language. If they have a chance to see words arranged by patterns they have in common, it would make so much more sense to them!
7. Omit a sound or add one that is not in the word. Again, when children do this sort of thing, it is because they don’t understand the structure of our words. While English is a horrendously inconsistent language, there ARE ways to teach words using the chunks they have in common. For some reason, struggling readers can remember words when they are grouped with words that have an element in common.
8. Successfully sound out a word but not recall having done so a line or two later. Children who struggle to read too often become focused on the technical aspects of sounding out words and don’t seem to understand that reading is MORE than sounding out strings of letters (words). They think they are reading when they can sound out a word, and then the next word, and so forth.
9. Try to sound out every word they come to. Children that haven’t purposefully visualized whole words will of course not remember them next time they see them.
10. Confuse words that look very similar to each other. There are many words that look like each other (ie: the beginnings and endings are the same) and some words that are flipped to each other (ie: saw and was, no and on).
Yikes! Traditional ways of teaching reading are just not friendly for struggling readers, obviously. There is a way to reach these children and have them succeed beyond our wildest expectations.
Over time, as I worked with children who struggled to read, I realized that visual learners just don’t remember the same way non-visual learners do. It is hard for me to understand how non-visual people remember because I am highly visual myself. Let me assure you: the concepts I remember easily are most frequently attached to a strong visual and a setting (story).
Other options
Opting to use non-traditional tools and approaches might make a conscientious parent feel squirmy, but if you have a child who is struggling with reading, please consider giving a non-traditional approach a try. Your child might find reading as easy as falling off a log.
Sarah Major, CEO of Child1st Publications, grew up on the mission field with her four siblings, all of whom her mother homeschooled. As an adult, Sarah has homeschooled a small group of children in collaboration with their parents, and has taught from preschool age to adult. Sarah has been the Title 1 director and program developer for grades K-7, an ESOL teacher, and a classroom teacher. As an undergraduate student, Sarah attended Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill. and then received her M.Ed. from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, MI. In 2006 Sarah resigned from fulltime teaching in order to devote more time to Child1st, publisher of the best-selling SnapWords™ stylized sight word cards. In her spare time Sarah enjoys gardening, cooking, pottery, quilting, and spending time with her family.
It helps to understand ahead of time what will be hard for struggling readers to do. After working with children who have trouble learning for several years and taking the time to consider what they have in common, I have compiled a list of skills that are hard for them. It is important to bear in mind that commonly the children who have trouble learning to read are visual and/or kinesthetic children.
This is significant because visual/kinesthetic children have specific learning strengths that we cannot ignore and expect them to learn easily. My rule of thumb is that if teaching the traditional way doesn’t work for a child, look for signs of the child being a visual or kinesthetic learner. And then I change my approach fundamentally, including going from whole to part. An easy way to do this is to start with sight words before tackling phonics. I know, I know. That might sound like a huge no no, but please bear with me.
Specific skills that struggling readers have trouble with:
The following areas are not going to all hold true for all struggling readers, but they are skills that crop up most frequently.
Struggling readers may:
1. Not be auditory at all. So this means that telling them what a word says and even teaching a little lesson in which they write the word and read the word aloud many times might not result in learning. Doing this sort of thing will take up a lot of time and will leave both of you more discouraged than before. So don’t rely on words to teach them with the expectation of great results.
2. Need hooks for remembering. One of the best connections between words and meaning I’ve found is pictures. This is because a picture is captured instantly. It doesn’t have to be explained. It’s instant. A word embedded in an image that shows the meaning of the word is magical to these children. For a visual learner, images are everything.
3. Benefit from gestures that match the learning concept. When you give kinesthetic or tactile learners a gesture or body motion, they have a body hook to memory and this makes all the difference for them.
4. Have trouble handling a lot of details while learning. If a child struggles to read, it is likely that giving him a lot of rules to follow for deciphering a word will stand in his way rather than helping him out. It is more likely that he will do much better being taught the whole word if it is embedded in a picture. Once he can get used to viewing the word as an image rather than as a string of letters, he will improve. Once he can recognize the word, then you can teach phonics skills that pertain to the word. If you are working with a visual learner, it is great to know that these children learn best from whole to part and not the other way around. (Whole words and then letter sequence, for example).
5. Be shaky on basic letter sounds. The most basic building blocks for words are sounds. If a child is shaky on sounds, this will frequently create a stumbling block to learning to read. The most common culprits are vowel sounds. It is essential that they know their sounds well. When I work with struggling readers, I always check their knowledge of vowel sounds first.
6. Mix up the sequence of letters in words. Struggling readers aren’t aware of the patterns in our language. They view each word as an unique in the vast ocean of words in our language. If they have a chance to see words arranged by patterns they have in common, it would make so much more sense to them!
7. Omit a sound or add one that is not in the word. Again, when children do this sort of thing, it is because they don’t understand the structure of our words. While English is a horrendously inconsistent language, there ARE ways to teach words using the chunks they have in common. For some reason, struggling readers can remember words when they are grouped with words that have an element in common.
8. Successfully sound out a word but not recall having done so a line or two later. Children who struggle to read too often become focused on the technical aspects of sounding out words and don’t seem to understand that reading is MORE than sounding out strings of letters (words). They think they are reading when they can sound out a word, and then the next word, and so forth.
9. Try to sound out every word they come to. Children that haven’t purposefully visualized whole words will of course not remember them next time they see them.
10. Confuse words that look very similar to each other. There are many words that look like each other (ie: the beginnings and endings are the same) and some words that are flipped to each other (ie: saw and was, no and on).
Yikes! Traditional ways of teaching reading are just not friendly for struggling readers, obviously. There is a way to reach these children and have them succeed beyond our wildest expectations.
Over time, as I worked with children who struggled to read, I realized that visual learners just don’t remember the same way non-visual learners do. It is hard for me to understand how non-visual people remember because I am highly visual myself. Let me assure you: the concepts I remember easily are most frequently attached to a strong visual and a setting (story).
Other options
Opting to use non-traditional tools and approaches might make a conscientious parent feel squirmy, but if you have a child who is struggling with reading, please consider giving a non-traditional approach a try. Your child might find reading as easy as falling off a log.
Sarah Major, CEO of Child1st Publications, grew up on the mission field with her four siblings, all of whom her mother homeschooled. As an adult, Sarah has homeschooled a small group of children in collaboration with their parents, and has taught from preschool age to adult. Sarah has been the Title 1 director and program developer for grades K-7, an ESOL teacher, and a classroom teacher. As an undergraduate student, Sarah attended Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill. and then received her M.Ed. from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, MI. In 2006 Sarah resigned from fulltime teaching in order to devote more time to Child1st, publisher of the best-selling SnapWords™ stylized sight word cards. In her spare time Sarah enjoys gardening, cooking, pottery, quilting, and spending time with her family.
Child1st Publications, LLC
www.child1st.com
800-881-0912
PO Box 150226
Grand Rapids, MI 49515
