Using a metronome to help with fluency

I have worked with children and fluency my entire adult life and could find no success long ago when I tried a metranome. You know? I had much more success when we worked with rhyming material with a good rhthym. I (as reading “conductor”) could establish a good rhythm. Ken CampbellLaura wrote:

Thank you for sharing that Ken! It sounds like a metronome isn’t the answer, but I was just hoping it might be since I’ve been a little “frantic” in searching for something that might help.

I think we may have hit a wall and it just may be that there really isn’t anything. I’ll try using rhyme, but my intution is telling me that the next step might be giving vision therapy a try. Also, timed reading. Fluency was probably the wrong word to describe his difficulty. I need to look at what may help improve reading speed.

Reading for my son is very slow and painful (even though he can now decode relatively difficult words and has made great progress). At moments he’ll read fairly well, but then at other moments he gets very confused with words he’s quite familiar with (like “was” as “saw” or “this” as “what” and even pausing on “the” or “a”). His teacher insists he doesn’t have dyslexia, but how come it’s soo extremely difficult for him to figure out certain letters and certain numbers. When he’s writing and he comes to a word with “d” or “b” how come he has to look at his left hand (held in the shape of a “b”) to know the correct way to write it? It’s so frustrating not to have any answers!!!

When I’ve brought up dyslexia, she tells me that in the children who have it, it’s much more pronounced and obvious. I’m wondering if it’s possible for certain kids to learn how to compensate to a degree that it’s not so obvious. Also, my son always seems to test higher than his abilities.

I spend most of my time tutoring getting kids to slow down, de-stress, and actually *look* at the words on the page, or the problems in the math book. The thought of a metronome makes me shiver — as one other parent on this board put it, a form of torture. Try removing as much stress as physically possible from the reading situation. Vision therapy might also help; you need a diagnosis for that. Keep reminding yourself and your son that it’s NOT a race and there’s no fire. See if you can get his teachers to remove stress on speed — he still has to learn material, but who says he absolutely must cover ten pages in ten minutes? Most adults don’t read like that. Once he reads accurately and with comprehension and interest, them you might wonder if he could speed up; but every kid I’ve ever taught sped up independently after mastering the skills. Every person I’ve ever met who raced for speed was a weak and unwilling and inaccurate reader. The tortoise and the hare syndrome. .

Laura,
I have had kids like this and they needed vision therapy. Rod knows a lot about this and he can probably help you.

Well….speeding up or slowing down isn’t really a choise. He’s going to read where he can. The reason I’ve been working to try and get him up to grade level is so he doesn’t have to constantly be pulled out from class (for reading intervention). I volunteer in the class every week so I see what he’s missing and it’s important material. Also, I’ve noticed that it’s beginning to effect his self-esteem.

Interestingly, he is an accurate reader and he does have good comprehension. But he’s unusually slow and will pause before a word that one moment prior read with ease.

Thanks for your post. Allowing reading speed to develop naturally makes good sense.

I’m definitely going to give it a try. I made an appointment for a developmental eye exam next week.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! :-)

are often the result of developmental vision delays, so I think you are on the right track. It’s not so much a matter of getting vision therapy, though. Rather, it’s a matter of getting a good developmental vision evaluation to determine whether or not there are developmental vision delays. If there are, then vision therapy is usually extremely helpful in bringing sensory/motor vision skills up to age-appropriate levels. If there aren’t, you would want to try cognitive training instead.

Cognitive training works on the next level of skills development — things like directionality, pattern recognition, sequencing, and processing speed. What you have described indicates poor cognitive skills development in these areas. The first step is to determine if developmental vision delays are responsible and, if so, to correct the developmental vision delays. If there are no developmental vision delays, or after they have been corrected as much as possible, it’s a good idea to do cognitive training.

My daughter’s reading fluency (and speed) did not improve until about halfway through PACE (Processing and Cognitive Enhancement, http://www.learninginfo.com). We did vision therapy first, to establish a solid sensory/motor foundation for cognitive skills development.

Mary