CHAPTER 8. HELP FOR OLDER CHILDREN AND CHILDREN WITH READING PROBLEMS
Who is the program designed for?
The program was also originally designed for a child who needed to be extended and a child with learning problems. By using the various methods described in the daily sessions you could take your child at his own pace right through to writing words and multiple sentences.
It could be used by a parent with a child on an extended holiday or when he is confined to bed for a lengthy period.
It can be used in full or by just taking bits that suit your child.
It can be used if you are homeschooling your child at home for whatever reason.
It can be used, as was originally designed in conjunction with normal schooling.
Assisting a child who is falling behind and needs extra help at any stage.
Almost all the activities can be used for a child in his second or third year at school who for some reason has not grasped the initial stages - or in fact modified to suit your child it could be used at any stage.
Diagnosis of reading problems?
As a principal of a school I was quite frequently approached by parents of children who were not, in their opinion proceeding satisfactorily, generally in reading, with a request that we immediately find out WHAT IS WRONG!
Although it may be valuable to diagnose the causes of reading difficulty in a particular child, I have found as a teacher, however varied the diagnosis may be, the remedies are almost all the same, just more intensive efforts to teach the child efficiently using the methods that suit him best.
Unless there is some physical problem such as hearing or eyesight deficit, there is no magic cure for poor memory, lack of concentration - or a more common problem - lack of motivation.
I also did a frustrating post graduate university course on Remedial reading. We spent three quarters of the course on diagnosis of dyslexia, and reading problems - then one term on what to do about all these problems - and the only answer was - just more intensive and appropriate and imaginative teaching.
Helping a child with serious reading problems
The only way to help a child is for someone who has the time and sufficient expertise, but most importantly, cares sufficiently, to give the child continuous help at the level he is at, at the moment. This often requires much repetition of vocabulary, much re-teaching of basic phonic symbols and blending skills and hours of painful listening to stumbling reading, giving the correct feedback to a child to enable him to finally remember those words. Also of such importance is that someone really is willing to give him the encouragement to keep battling on. Usually the only person available to do all this is a parent.
Some schools now have small group programs such as Reading Recovery, but in a general classroom the teacher only has time to give a very small amount of extra help while dealing with the class at all of its various levels of achievement.
With the material in this program a caring parent or grandparent would have sufficient knowledge and is likely to be the only who cares enough to give their child the help he needs.
But I suggest that for those of you who have the chance, make sure that this never occurs by
Developing a helping relationship with older children
One of the reasons that this program was written for four and five year olds is that at that stage and younger they are most receptive to parental help - and if it is offered and accepted then a good working relationship can be developed easily.
Although it may be more difficult helping a child who is having difficulties, I believe the activities here are suitable, with some adaptation, for a beginner reader of pretty well any age. And at any age a child is very happy to accept the undivided attention of a caring adult.
Once a child can read reasonably well, writing becomes the most valuable activity with an older child.
How do you continue to develop your child’s reading?
I believe the most important way is through the constant provision of suitable and highly motivating reading material - gradually extending the difficulty of the material as your child can cope with it.
Reading aloud at home
Maybe! You may initially help by hearing your child read aloud, but even early on, a child should learn that he is reading to himself for his own meaning. At first a child reads aloud for his own assistance - that is it helps him get the meaning from what he is reading, but he soon needs encouragement to read silently.
With a grade 1 children I found that they loved to read to themselves and we would often have free reading periods, but in the early stages I used to take them out on to the oval for it, because when the majority was still reading aloud, the noise in the classroom of thirty children enthusiastically reading their own books to themselves was overwhelming,
Accurate reading?
I don’t believe that one needs to be very concerned about completely accurate reading at any stage, however, at each stage you need to check by occasional oral reading checks that your child’s silent reading is not too inaccurate. I believe that if he continues to read enthusiastically these inaccuracies will gradually disappear - and I would remind you that at all stages guesswork plays a very considerable part in reading.
By the way it is my guess that many children are turned off reading by the continued oral reading that they are subjected to - reading to “Reading mothers” at school, reading aloud to parents at home. I’m afraid that I would let my daughters read their readers silently at home and tell me when they had finished and I would tick their card!.
There are a number of publications to help you to work on specific tasks with your child - such as teaching him the various sound combinations - “oo”, “ough” for instance - if he has missed being taught.
Source of reading material
I am a great believer that the best way to teach reading after the initial stages have been covered is by more and more reading in a graduated diet.
Your children’s library will have a wide variety of books - starting from simple books for beginner readers.
Obtaining books on a kindle or tablet is a simple and easy way to find books for children, but not as inexpensive as a library.
The size of the print in a book can be a good quick guide to you regarding its difficulty. There are many good, well-written paperback books available for children these days.
What if your child doesn’t want to read?
This is the most difficult problem and a very common one indeed once a child is seven or eight or older.
I do not believe the answer is to ignore this and wait until he wants to read again. I don’t believe that this is likely to happen. The children in his grade who are still reading enthusiastically will be moving far ahead, while he is at a standstill. The type of story he wishes to read will be getting harder and harder and his skill will not be increasing proportionally unless he is reading.
But how do you interest him? Do you insist he reads even though he doesn’t want to?
Of course it is impossible to make a child read, if he absolutely refuses - and you must be careful not to get into a confrontation situation where he refuses to cooperate because you are really pushing him too hard.
Why does he not like to read?
One of the reasons for a lack of desire too read is because he is not very good at it.
One of the remedies for this problem is to make sure that he has books available that he finds easy - even if you think he should be reading more difficult things. Some authorities suggest that all a child’s reading for pleasure should be with books that are much simpler than those he can really read.
I recently heard a mathematics teacher who had had great success with remedial teaching of mathematics say - make sure that the learner has some success immediately - success is the great motivator for further learning.
Some times you need to find books from those available that are not particularly good literature. – It used to be the many Enid Blyton titles, which were easy to read but very trivial in their content. This type of book is good for encouraging a reluctant reader.
Some motivating ideas
If your child wants to read a book he is more likely to be willing to struggle through it. And every time he reads a book his skill and speed improves.
Let him choose a new book or books to buy himself and let him have the new one only when he has finished the first one.
Read the first chapter or two to him to get him into the book, or alternative chapters to help him stay interested in the story.
Ask him to read to a younger sibling or help a younger child with his reading.
Highly promoted books like the Harry Potter series can also motivate reluctant readers to attempt more difficult reading.
I can remember a little aboriginal boy sitting down and persevering with the third Harry Potter book when he was only about seven years old.
Some other young readers are not particularly attracted to fiction.
One of our sons-in-law preferred to read the “Guiness book of records”. My husband loved reading encyclopedias. I can remember providing the sports pages of the local rag to a year 5 remedial group of boys each week.
These days there are other things too, like code books, and the phone messages from your friends..
Reading his own writing
With a very reluctant older reader who really needed much help, I would work to encourage and assist him to write his own material, diaries, stories, documentary material (see experience reading and writing). I would then type it up, have him illustrate it, bind it, and encourage him to share it with anyone he could find. I would do this over and over until I had a breakthrough.
No time?
Another reason why he is not really interested in reading maybe because he has no time, or other things to do with the time he has.
Television and computer games can often be the culprit here - and is I believe a terrible waster of children’s time. You could limit the amount of screen time to the amount of time spent reading - or something similar.
Our second hand black and white television broke down when Lizzie was in year eleven and I offered to buy a new colour one but to my surprise, she asked that we put it off until she had finished her final year of school!
Earlier Lizzie had a period when she was too busy to read- we agreed that she would read for half an hour a day, and usually this was the last half hour before she put the light out. Sometimes it was before school, or as an incentive instead of some chore such as drying the dishes. If we forgot she had to stay up until it was done.
Then she had a teacher who allowed the class to have large amounts of free reading time, and she got hooked.
Child controlled learning
This program spends much time giving children the tools with which to learn to read, and many of the activities can be continued by the child in his or her own way to provide child directed learning, which is different from teaching.
It is the most effective and productive type of learning and what a pre school child does most of the time. You provide the setting and your child learns from what he takes from it. Here we are providing one basic technique - matching - that a child can use to teach himself about words and then letters. We then encourage child to listen, and more matching and listening enables a child to learn to recognize sounds and letters and put them together. The games provide a little more fun in the practice periods, then learning to write provides the skill by which to express oneself and continue one’s education indefinitely.
Lindy taught herself to recognize all her letters with only some brief initial help from me. She was prepared to use her alphabet book as the reference and compare her individual letter cards with the letter in the book, until she could remember what each letter sound was. She continually sorted the letter cards into the ones she could remember and the ones she had to check until the last pile was nonexistent.
John Holt author of How Children Fail: "My advice is always to let the children determine what happens, give children as much access to ... the world around them as possible. See which things interest them most and help them go down that particular road.
Most of all youngsters are- by nature- curious and eager to learn ...babies are such active skillful seekers of knowledge that the learn more in the first five years of their lives than most other folks do in ten."
I learned to let the children I taught take a great deal of control of their own learning partly by accident.
I always believed that I should set up the learning environment and let them do the learning. But the year after I had been lecturing in Infant School Method I went back to the job I loved with children. I had a lovely composite class of somewhat underprivileged country children. But I was also doing the final year of my arts degree by correspondence. I’m afraid that some times things like the broadcast biweekly French dictation practice test were mid morning. My children became absolutely excellent at going on with their own work when I had mine to do. I was astonished to discover that my children could learn better without me. I provided the setting and the prompts but they had a great deal of control over what they would spend their time doing - they could do formal work or informal, but they produced some of the best written work and art - I had ever seen - individual, imaginative some time even nearly inspired! I never again closely controlled a grade’s learning but always gave an even larger amount of latitude than I had done previously