I am a second year teacher who teaches 3-5 grade interrelated classes. In my 3rd grade classes, there is a boy who doesn’t even know his sight words. He sees the word “cat” and reads:”The dog ran up the hill.” He can’t even tell me letter namesall the time. He is classified LD, is currently in the process of re-evaluation, and is possibly dislexic. Any suggestion on how I can work with him?
teaching reading
Well, first, stop trying to teach sight words by memorization. It is clearly worse than useless for this student. Then work hard on letter identification and sound-symbol correspondence. Do *just* this until he is over 90% accurate. He should be able to give the common *sound* for each letter. Since he probably already is familiar with letter names, the best approach is to keep the name and work on adding the sound. He needs multisensory work, tracing and writing the letters as well as looking at them. He should be doing *only* lower-case until he is much more accurate. Also get a good guide on letter formation and make sure he is using correct directionality, consistently only left to right and top to bottom. Forming b and d identically is a sure-fire way to learn to confuse them.
Once he has a grip on letters as sound symbols, start sounding out really little words starting with at and it and on and up and Ed. Then step by step he can learn cat and bat and sat. sit and pit, Don and Ron, cup and pup, bed and red. This may take quite some time — consider it an investment.
The main thing is to work one tiny step at a time, be sure he is firmly in control of each step before moving on, and practice practice practice every day. If possible he needs someone — an aide, a parent volunteer, a high school student — to sit with him at least 30 minutes a day or three hours a week and to work with hikm steadily on the basics (make sure any tutorial assistant doesn’t go off into memorizing and inventing words again of course.)
I’d go buy a copy of Reading Reflex today. It’s the parent guide for teaching the Phonographix method of decoding. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it’s quick, multisensory, and works well for many, many non-readers. Best of all, it’s under $20.