The Reason Bright Kids Often Struggle To Read and How To Help
By: David Morgan
Failing to learn to read is a devasting blow to a young child, and it is usually quite unnecessary. The underlying reason why many bright children find reading hard is that the early reading books they use encourage the wrong techniques. The warning signs are easy to spot.
However, this problem has proved easy to fix.
The Warning Signs
The children we help have often seemed to do well in the early stages of reading. The alphabet is not a big problem for them and the child has often learnt a few words quite easily.
As the child starts reading simple books, a habit of guessing develops. Usually the guess will make sense, but will be nothing like the actual word on the page.
As the child moves up to higher levels of books, it can seem that his or her reading ability is actually going the other way.
Eventually it all gets too much and the child's confidence collapses. By now it can be very difficult to progress in any direction because there will be heavy resistance to reading at all.
If this situation locks in, the child's entire educational career (and future adult life) is threatened. But we find it is usually simple to fix in quite a short time.
The Cause
Reading is a complex task and it is natural for a child to use whatever approach seems easiest. If your child has a good visual memory, then remembering words by sight seems the best option.
Any child will almost certainly be being taught phonics in the classroom. But, in a whole class setting, it is easy to be quietly baffled, without the teacher really knowing or having the time to work through it one-on-one in any case.
The design of early reading books usually feeds this very situation. They use a small number of words and repeat them a lot. That makes them easy to read for a child who is memorising the words by sight.
But, in reality, the child is not reading at all, but using a shortcut. And is travelling down a blind alley with no exit.
We need to gently lead them out of their dead end and down the right path.
The Solution
The key is to help the child get a memory hook on all the different phonemes being used in English. The Easyread Coaching System does this by presenting a bright and slightly bizarre image for each of them, with a simple rhyme to remember. This was developed from memory activation processes used by memory specialists.
Then you need to present exercises that break the memorisation and guessing habbit. The Easyread Coaching System uses games and exercises specially designed to do that.
Once the child is redirected onto the right path, you need to make it easy to travel. Confidence is further built by steady reading practise. In Easyread we allow the child to read text unaided each day, by floating the images connected to each phoneme over the text. In that way, the child always has support when puzzling over a word.
With these changes in place, we see children who have been struggling for years crack the reading puzzle in a matter of weeks.
Article Source: http://www.ezarticles.info
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