Adhd and reading problems

No, there are not always reading problems. My son is ADD and he has always been an excellent reader.

Janis

It depends on the child. My daughter had reading problems to start with. They were mainly attention related. She could not get through even the smallest easiest books without tremendous effort. Her attention kept wavering. I am talking about beginning books here. Now, however, she is an excellent reader. She reads best when she finds a book very interesting. Less interesting material is not well retained (think textbooks here). But reading for pleasure is something she really enjoys. She is now reading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

The answer is no — and sometimes it’s the reading ( or other language or auditory processing) problem that is the basis for having difficulty maintaining attention.

THere are often organizational and/or comprehension issues, though, so if your child has ADHD and is reading fluently, keep an eye on understanding, especially things like seeing the “big idea” instead of only seeing a detail here and there because that’s the piece of it that grabbed your attention, but you didn’t step back and connect the pieces.

No. There are not always reading issues that associate with ADHD.

If a child has reading issues as well as ADHD, the reading issues could be virtually anything. Sometimes ADHD just makes it hard for a child to sit and concentrate to read or hard for them to focus while reading.

No. There are not always reading issues that associate with ADHD.

If a child has reading issues as well as ADHD, the reading issues could be virtually anything. Sometimes ADHD just makes it hard for a child to sit and concentrate to read or hard for them to focus while reading.

I’m having her tested this month for nvld and or adhd.
When she reads she seems to become confused over
meaning. And I mean very confused. She told me last
night thru her tears she didn’t think she read well.
(She is an advanced reader) Her exact words were…
When you can read well, you do not only just say the
words. You understand what they mean. And I can’t
do that. What does the word THE mean? I don’t
understand alot of words I read.
She is gifted with spelling and phonic. (very advance)
But comprehension is not there.
Just wanted to know if this sound familiar…….

Kelly,

I cannot specifically diagnose what is wrong with your child, but I do know something that might help her. Visualizing and Verbalizing by Lindamood-Bell is to help children who have poor reading comprehension. My child has some short-term memory issues that stem from auditory processing disorder, and I will probably use V+V at some point to help her get some meaning from what she reads and hears.

Janis

She sounds like she is “Hyperlexic” or a word caller, in your words she mastered the orthographic code of reading but she doesn’t have the comprehension because of either vocabulary issues or because she has a non-verbal learning disability.

This sounds familiar to me. I have worked with kids who have this type of problem. Some ESL kids understand the code but they don’t have the vocabulary for comprehension. We have to spend a lot of time discussing to help gain comprehension. The Visualizing and Verbalizing program would help here.

Many persons with ADHD can read just fine. There is an overlap fo ADHD and LD of, I believe, about 30-40%.

Patti, Was curious as too which pattern of reading problems is seen most. Do more kids have problems with comprehension then they do decoding, decoding more then comprehension or a combination of both of these? My two children who are below grade level in reading have much better comprehension then they do decoding skills. They are very good at seeing the whole picture and even some abstract from reading but can’t seem to decode or remember simple facts from what they read. Their teachers comment on how they have VERY POOR phonics skills. I am just curious how can they have good comprehension if they can’t read? How can a child miss a simple question that is direct but get the abstract questions right? My oldest son says if he can imagine in his mind (a picture) the word he can read it easier then if it is a word he can not. He finds reading to be very tiresome and boring. He says if you can’t read it how exciting can it be? Any ways I was just curious to how common a profile this is. Thanks.

Hi Mom, I know you were asking Patti
and I am interested in this answer too.
It seems to me my dd is the other way
around. She seems to need more pictures
when she reads. And becomes upset if the
pictures do not line up with the words.
If you picture well and have decoding problems
isn’t this dyslexic? Site www.CHADD.org/attention/attnv6n5p30.htm

Patti, If she was nvld and Hyperlexic.Would she still
be able to answer simple comprehension questions at
the end of the story?
Here is the problem in a nutshell.
She is gifted testing at reading level of 4.2 level.
With avg. comprehendsion on the Wics III which
would have been First grade at the time.
Confermed with Woodcock and Johnson acd. test
She has problems with abstract language also
idioms, sarcasm, inferences,conversations, and double
meanings of some words. Concert reading is no problem
even up to 5.0 level. But if there is any grey areas it
is a total mess. Her biggest complain is it does not
make sence. She becomes fustrated and tells me
the book is wrong.
After all that my question is this:
Could her giftedness with decodeing just cause this
frustation, and the comp. will come later. (She’s in 2nd gr.)
Or is the warning signs or a disorder?
Is abstract language a part to 2nd grade reading?
I hope this makes sence. I have looked everywhere
on the net for information on Reading/comprehension levels
and come up empty. Thanks Kelly

I’m hoping someone will come here and recommend that you buy “Reading Reflex” to teach those basic decoding skills. The kids will have much bigger problems down the road if they don’t have this foundation. I am short on time now to go into this, but don’t wait. Give your child these skills!

Janis

It’s good that she recognizes that she doesn’t understand — sometimes that’s half the battle ;) I will also recommend V & V — I don’t have personal experience w/ it (but will soon… just got it delivered at work today :)) but the teacher next door used it extensively with two bright girls who seemed to be able to read fine, but really had trouble putting things together, seeing the abstractions, etc.
Another excellent resource is Joanne Carlisle’s _Reasoning and REading_ (and it’s a lot cheaper than V/V) — you can find it and sample pages at www.epsbooks.com . I’ve used it a lot, though it doens’t have enough practice so I end up using one worksheet as a model, and making a lot more like it. That way, though, I can use the ideas and make the topic something of interest or something else we’re learning about. SOmetimes I’ll tie them to literature and there are some examples on my site at www.resourceroom.net (check the “Reading comprehension” link).
Teaching reading comprehension is challenging because so many of us have no idea how we *learned* it — it just sort of happened. Well, it doesnt/ just happen with everybody. In general, I go by some principles like: starting with oral language (so if I”m teaching inferences, we’ll talk about them and make inferences about things around us), keeping things as concrete as possible and then introducing one aspect of abstraction at a time (and again, doing it talking first), and thoroughly, thoroughly exploring the ideas and practicing them.

In my experience, the “decoding behind comprehension” problem is far more common — especially when a kiddo has an environmnet where s/he engages in thought-provoking conversation. IT’s not just reading to your kiddo that builds those language skills, it’s all those discussions, those explanations of double meanings, etc. If your kiddo has the less common issue, then you have to be aware that what well-meaning folks suggest for “helping with the reading problem” may not be appropriate for your kid. (On the other hand, there’s that whole cadre of folks who believe that decoding problems are rare and as long as they keep telling each other that, it must be true — so their ideas for building comprehension *may* be helpful — but often there are other problems since logical thinking isn’t necessarily their strength…)

Oh, and speaking of logical thinking — I”ve heard consistently *excellent* things about Critical Thinking Skills books, and I’d recommend working on that thinking for any kiddo with comprehension issues.

Sue, I want to make sure I read you right. Decodeing problems are
more common than comprehension problems? And I will check out
every program everyone has suggested. thank you

I have one son who is a 7th grader, add/inattentive who had a terrible time learning to read, still has comprehension problems, some difficulty still with figuring out unfamiliar words.
My other son is adhd but learned to read in kindergarten very quickly, we often had a hard time getting him to eat in restaurants because he was too busy figuring out words on the advertisements and menus. He is a fast reader, however, I have found in his recent tests of required reading books that he is not doing well in the comprehension part. He is a 5th grader.
Amazingly, my younger son was in speech at age 2yrs 10 mos until 3yrs and again in 3rd grade for articulation(he had very few consonants in his speech, substituted w for almost everything), had tubes in his ears at 1yr and tonsils out at 3yrs9mos.
My older son didn’t have as much difficulty healthwise, other than tonsils out at age 4yrs. My husband and I both think the speech therapy helped my younger son with the learning of letter sounds, especially if you keep in mind he had to learn to say most of them from the speech teacher.
I describe adhd to my kids in this way. Adhd is like a cold because its symptoms are different in different people. One person may have a sniffle, another may have cough and stuffy nose and another may have fever,aches,etc.
I think the academic difficulties vary from person to person in the same way. My kids are both mine biologically but they present their adhd in different ways from each other.

From what you have described she is gifted at decoding but part of the problem is at her age many kids do not have the cognitive skills to pick up idioms, sarcasm, and inference. But if she has a NVLD then this would explain the extreme difficulties she is encountering with understanding language.

Some kids who are gifted with decoding really don’t understand the whole reason for reading is to gain meaning. But your daughter doesn’t fit into this profile because she is smart enough to want to gain meaning and frustrated that she cant.

On the other spectrum the kids who just think to “read” means to just decode words. When you ask them about what they just read they say, “I don’t know???” I have to start by asking them questions to see if I can pry out the comprehension and understanding.

If your daughter has NVLD then she is going to have to learn it step by step as Sue described. This can be accomplished through discussion by questioning and answering and helping her come to the answers on her own without literally telling her. She needs to be “guided” through this thinking process that many of us take for granted. Richard Boning was the author of a series of books by SRA for developing comprehension skills in the main idea, inference, etc. LMB uses the boning books as part of the Visualizing and Verbalizing program.

Thank you so much. Your explaination is what I have been looking
for. Kelly

“Richard Boning was the author of a series of books by SRA for developing comprehension skills in the main idea, inference, etc. LMB uses the boning books as part of the Visualizing and Verbalizing program.”

I believe you are referring to The Specific Skill Series. I have used these for comprehension for years and really like them! I am excited to know that V/V incorporates them!

Janis

In *my* experience, I have encountered more students whose comprehension was better than their decoding skills. I would not venture to generalize this to the general population.
One (of many!) problems is that most assessments don’t really discern the difference. A silent reading test doesn’t indicate whether your mistakes were because you couldn’t comprehend what you read correctly because it was just so many words flyign by, or you sincerely thought “reading” was correctly identifying words and didn’t even know to *try* to get meaning from it, or if you read “The judges of East Africa are home to many large snakes” … instead of jungles… or “Dad choked ” instead of “Dad chortled”.

Gotta write that one down …

My sons problems are similar to what you were describing where he “substitutes” or missreads words to say something other then what they are. He is the type of student to get the big picture, to catch on to the abstract but misses the details. If you ask him to draw a picture of what he read about you are more likely to get what he wants to “say”, showing you he understood fully. If you ask him to write about it you mind as well forget it. He can also verbally tell you about it pretty well except for specific questions. Here is a good example to show the difference in his abilities. He took a litature test and scored a 38, the teacher allowed him to retake the test orally and he scored an 89. His reading skills are only 2 years behind but that seems to be enough to make such a big difference in his test scores. She asked him to draw a series of pictures about the story and she found he understood it better then she thought from his orginal test score. The story was read together as a class so the only reading required by him was when it came to the test. He is dx’d as ADHD and I found this interesting.

and other kids I have tutored. They can put the stuff together sometimes much better when being read to orally but where they get frustrated is their decoding skills are deficient. She always scores higher on oral comprehension than on the silent reading comprehension. Part of it is the problems with decoding. My daughter knows all the code but she still resorts to memorizing words. She doesn’t have the patience to decode words because of the ADD. She can do it when I prompt her to do it. My daughter is a phonetic speller but even though she memorizes words she doesn’t have the ability to spell well it is always phonetic.. We use a lot of mnemonics to help her with spelling with difficult patterns to memorize.

Please, please, get him tested orally more often — don’t make him ask for it :) It’s not just that it’s not showing what he knows; he will be learning from the test, too.

To add my 2 cents, my son had a similiar problem. He was diagnosed with eye teaming and a viual processing deficit. When reading orally, he would be fine due to the fact that a wrong word would be corrected, but when he read silently he could not comprehehnd what he had read because it was not being read in order. He had Vision Therapy for 6 months and continues on a home Perceptual Therapy Program. This was diagnosed at the beginning of 3rd grade and now, in 4th grade, his 504 was thrown out in September. His Reading Comprehension score on his CATS in 2nd grade was 47, and for 3rd it was 81 after only 6 weeks of therapy. We are expecting the upper 90’s this year. My son also has ADHD, I have been informed that Visual and Auditory Prcoessing Disorders/Deficits are more common among children with ADD/ADHD.