by Sarah Major M.Ed.
If your child has struggled with reading during the last school year, I would imagine that the last thing he or she wants to hear is that you plan to use the summer to strengthen reading skills. For this reason, it is very important to not do the same things this summer that were already difficult for your child.
The approach to strengthening reading skills needs to be fun, different from the norm, and needs to provide success quickly.
Let’s pretend your child is named Chris:
1. Focus on high-frequency words. There are specific words that show up in every book Chris reads, so it makes sense to focus on the words that comprise up to 90% of what Chris will read. The more quickly and automatically Chris can read these words, the easier reading will be in general. Being able to recognize high-frequency words instantly is the quickest way to get a struggling reader up to speed.
2. Forget the phonics rules. I remember when my son went to college, he wanted to study music. He LOVED music. The first class he took, however, was music theory, and because the class was all about rules and dry …well… theory, my son was turned off to formal music study. The best way to kill the joy in reading is to make a child try and memorize (and then apply) a bunch of seemingly arbitrary rules. Much better to engage Chris in a book about something he or she loves, and then slip in some patterns in language that emerge.
3. Use books that are known to be full of high-frequency words. There are some books that are notorious for containing mostly the most widely-recognized high-frequency words. If you use these books for reading practice, attach something fun to reading them, it will seem less like work for Chris. Titles include:
a. One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
b. The Cat in the Hat
c. A Fly Went By
d. Green Eggs and Ham
e. Go Dog Go
f. I Want to Be Somebody New
g. Are You my Mother?
4. Make it into a game. There is nothing like setting a goal, making it fun, and making it worthwhile for Chris to embrace the goal as his or her goal. Brains love puzzles. You can lay the books out and challenge Chris to figure out which words appear the most often. You can make a checklist for him/her to check off the words as he/she becomes fluent with them. Plan for a fun play outing as a reward for when the goal is met.
5. Consider that Chris is a visual learner who needs images and body movement. Around 66% of all children prefer a visual/spatial approach to learning and fully 33% of children NEED a visual spatial approach to learning. It is safe to say that all struggling readers fall into this last group. It doesn’t much matter if the label says dyslexia, autism, ADHD, or any of the other most common labels, what all these children have in common is that they need a visual and tactile approach to learning in order to reach their highest potential.
6. Engage Chris in stylizing the words with colorful images. If you encourage Chris to create stylized versions of the target words, I can pretty much guarantee he or she will know the high-frequency words after. What he/she will do is write each word on a card and then embellish it to look like what it says. Then, his/her brain will snap a picture of the word and voila, it will be permanently in memory.
7. Use the decorated words as helps for learning new bigger words. If Chris encounters a new, unknown, scary word in a book, instead of teaching him/her the phonics rule for that word, instead of asking him/her to sound it out, hunt through the newly-created sight words for a word that has the same sound spelling as the new scary word and show Chris how they are related. For example, EIGHT has the same sound spelling that you find in NEIGHBORHOOD. EIGH says (long) A. And the OO in neighborhood is just like the OO in LOOK, a high-frequency word.
8. Encourage Chris to write his/her own original stories using high-frequency words. There is nothing at all like having a struggling child create something original to spark their belief in their own ability to learn. Put the power back into Chris’s hands this summer.
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
If your child has struggled with reading during the last school year, I would imagine that the last thing he or she wants to hear is that you plan to use the summer to strengthen reading skills. For this reason, it is very important to not do the same things this summer that were already difficult for your child.
The approach to strengthening reading skills needs to be fun, different from the norm, and needs to provide success quickly.
Let’s pretend your child is named Chris:
1. Focus on high-frequency words. There are specific words that show up in every book Chris reads, so it makes sense to focus on the words that comprise up to 90% of what Chris will read. The more quickly and automatically Chris can read these words, the easier reading will be in general. Being able to recognize high-frequency words instantly is the quickest way to get a struggling reader up to speed.
2. Forget the phonics rules. I remember when my son went to college, he wanted to study music. He LOVED music. The first class he took, however, was music theory, and because the class was all about rules and dry …well… theory, my son was turned off to formal music study. The best way to kill the joy in reading is to make a child try and memorize (and then apply) a bunch of seemingly arbitrary rules. Much better to engage Chris in a book about something he or she loves, and then slip in some patterns in language that emerge.
3. Use books that are known to be full of high-frequency words. There are some books that are notorious for containing mostly the most widely-recognized high-frequency words. If you use these books for reading practice, attach something fun to reading them, it will seem less like work for Chris. Titles include:
a. One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
b. The Cat in the Hat
c. A Fly Went By
d. Green Eggs and Ham
e. Go Dog Go
f. I Want to Be Somebody New
g. Are You my Mother?
4. Make it into a game. There is nothing like setting a goal, making it fun, and making it worthwhile for Chris to embrace the goal as his or her goal. Brains love puzzles. You can lay the books out and challenge Chris to figure out which words appear the most often. You can make a checklist for him/her to check off the words as he/she becomes fluent with them. Plan for a fun play outing as a reward for when the goal is met.
5. Consider that Chris is a visual learner who needs images and body movement. Around 66% of all children prefer a visual/spatial approach to learning and fully 33% of children NEED a visual spatial approach to learning. It is safe to say that all struggling readers fall into this last group. It doesn’t much matter if the label says dyslexia, autism, ADHD, or any of the other most common labels, what all these children have in common is that they need a visual and tactile approach to learning in order to reach their highest potential.
6. Engage Chris in stylizing the words with colorful images. If you encourage Chris to create stylized versions of the target words, I can pretty much guarantee he or she will know the high-frequency words after. What he/she will do is write each word on a card and then embellish it to look like what it says. Then, his/her brain will snap a picture of the word and voila, it will be permanently in memory.
7. Use the decorated words as helps for learning new bigger words. If Chris encounters a new, unknown, scary word in a book, instead of teaching him/her the phonics rule for that word, instead of asking him/her to sound it out, hunt through the newly-created sight words for a word that has the same sound spelling as the new scary word and show Chris how they are related. For example, EIGHT has the same sound spelling that you find in NEIGHBORHOOD. EIGH says (long) A. And the OO in neighborhood is just like the OO in LOOK, a high-frequency word.
8. Encourage Chris to write his/her own original stories using high-frequency words. There is nothing at all like having a struggling child create something original to spark their belief in their own ability to learn. Put the power back into Chris’s hands this summer.
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
