This message is for anyone who has some experience or advice for someone working with LD students in reading, or anyone who just feels like helping this struggling tutor!
i’m a volunteer in a first grade classroom and i’m tutoring several kids who are below the reading level. one little boy really has me stumped. i’m not qualified to diagnose his problem, and he hasn’t actually been professionally evaluated, so i don’t even know what the problem is. but the symptoms are this:
he cannot match letters to their sounds. he knows the alphabet and could identify all the letters for you, but can’t match their sounds correctly. for instance, if he sees a C on the page, he might try to pronounce it as an M. or if he sees a T, he might try to pronounce it as an S. in addition to this, he can’t seem to remember a concept long enough to grasp it. he forgets things very quickly. for instance, i might teach him a word. we go over it, sound it out, spell it out, have him write it down. after that, we move onto the next word. when i go back to the first word, he has forgotten it entirely. its as though we never went over it together. sometimes this happens so quickly it makes my head spin. today we were learning the TH sound. we had been going through the TH sound and TH words for about 25 minutes, when without warning, the student reached a familiar word, “with”, which we had gone over not long before, and forgot entirely what the TH sound was. it was as though the past 25 minutes had been erased. this isn’t always the case. sometimes he can remember things long enough to tell me what we learned at the end of the day. but often, i find that a word could repeat itself 3 or 4 times on one page, and he would have to relearn it in order to identify it every single time.
is there anyone out there who can help me help this kid? do these problems look familiar to anyone? could anyone identify whats wrong? any tips? material? authors? resources i could go to? i’ve been working with this student twice a week for about 8 weeks now, and haven’t seen any marked improvement. its frustrating for me, but more frustrating for him. he knows he’s behind, but it seems that there’s just some kind of block there…it’s so hard for him to learn these things.
any help or advice or suggestions would be enormously appreciated. thank you!!
-Janet
Re: i need some help!
Well, it sounds like you’re doing the right thing, teaching him letters and sounds and trying to get things right before moving on.
I am always happy to send out my how-to-teach-reading outlines/book in progress and you might get some more ideas from them; just ask at [email protected]
When I get a student showing confusion like you’re describing, the first thing I do is *slow down*. I spend lots of time on one sound and one pattern and one word and go over and over the same thing for most of the time together and again the next lesson and the next. I get workbooks that cover the material and if that is still too fast, two or three workbooks on the same level that can be used in parallel to cover the same material five times over.
I also approach the same thing from multiple directions, a reader with very limited controlled vocabulary in order to get repetition of high-frequency words, lots and lots of oral reading and correction and tracking with a pen point, a workbook that corresponds to the reader and covers comprehension and vocabulary and aplied phonics, a workbook with direct instruction in phonics and if necessay another one to parallel it, spelling by sounds, handwriting and tracing the same words and sounds, multisensory tracing the letter *as* you say the sound - over and over, handmade file cards and lists, and anything else that comes to mind.
The multifaceted attack along with the same thing coming back around a hundred times each hour is awfully slow *at first* but students seem to blossom once they’ve grasped those first few elements.
Re: i need some help!
Well, it sounds like you’re doing the right thing, teaching him letters and sounds and trying to get things right before moving on.
I am always happy to send out my how-to-teach-reading outlines/book in progress and you might get some more ideas from them; just ask at [email protected]
When I get a student showing confusion like you’re describing, the first thing I do is *slow down*. I spend lots of time on one sound and one pattern and one word and go over and over the same thing for most of the time together and again the next lesson and the next. I get workbooks that cover the material and if that is still too fast, two or three workbooks on the same level that can be used in parallel to cover the same material five times over.
I also approach the same thing from multiple directions, a reader with very limited controlled vocabulary in order to get repetition of high-frequency words, lots and lots of oral reading and correction and tracking with a pen point, a workbook that corresponds to the reader and covers comprehension and vocabulary and aplied phonics, a workbook with direct instruction in phonics and if necessay another one to parallel it, spelling by sounds, handwriting and tracing the same words and sounds, multisensory tracing the letter *as* you say the sound - over and over, handmade file cards and lists, and anything else that comes to mind.
The multifaceted attack along with the same thing coming back around a hundred times each hour is awfully slow *at first* but students seem to blossom once they’ve grasped those first few elements.
Re: i need some help!
Thanks for the suggestions! i’ll ask the teacher if she has any of the materials you suggested using in addition to the ones she has me working with already. i’ll keep you guys posted on how he’s doing and let you know if i need more help (eek!).
-janet
Hi J, If you will email me, I will send you some info I have exchanged with other teachers. I have helped lots of students like yours. [email protected] learntoreadnow.com Anita