S.O.A.R. to success

It is just a reading comprehension program and doesn’t address decoding issues. It didn’t help my kiddo..

It’s another one of those “make them feel successful so they’ll be successful” programs. Heavy on repeated reading and predictable words — light on teaching skills. Might help if exposure to literacy is what you’re missing.

… they can all show you “great results” when they test the kids on how they did on reading the story they’ve just gone over three times. If you look closer at their results they aren’t that impressive at all. The kids get a few more words memorized, so the numbers look a little better. Transfer to other words? not.,

Any suggestions as to what would work better for comprehension and decoding delays in 3,4, and 5th grade at risk students (both L.D. and non L.D.) students?

There are strategies for comprehension but you are talking about several issues actually. One is decoding, comprehension, which is impacted by a child’s background knowledge or lack thereof, vocabulary and reading levels are you at instructional, or frustration? One of the best strategies I know to help a child with comprehension is to expand his vocabulary. Now if you have kiddo’s who are having trouble decoding of course they are going to have trouble with comprehension. They spend so much time on the decoding that the comprehension goes out the window.

Because of my speech and language background I feel that children need to talk about what they have read and make pictures of what they have read. Comprehension is so much more than just answering questions after reading a passage. It is being able to understand and use what they have learned, to be able to talk about it and teach someone else.

Visualizing and Verbalizing is a good program to teach comphrehension. Preteach content vocabulary to the kids before you get into reading the content material. I don’t feel there is one “program” to teach comprehension really, it is more or less something I have to do as a speech therapist. I need to be able to reach the child by talking and providing language opportunities at their instructional level and then by the proper scaffolding I am able to expand their knowledge and comprehension. The downside is that this takes a lot of time, and the sad reality is that for many kids the way that they are taught in a classroom doesn’t even make a dent into their being able to comprehend the material.

I know I will not be able to comprehend reading material that involves computer and software design. I don’t have the necessary background knowledge and vocabulary to comprehend the material, I am not an engineer. I could read the material but to actually comprehend it that would be a different story.

I know many kids in middle school who are bombing science because they can’t fully comprehend the material. The teacher is just flying through, lecturing everyday but the kids aren’t getting it. How many 12 year old kids are conversant in endoplasmic retitculum, mitochodria, nuclei, golgi apparatus, etc…and will they be able to use this in the future???? LOL..the vocabulary is endless, the frustration is beyond measure….I know a kiddo who does all the homework without fail, listens to tapes, does flashcards and has 2 F’s on tests…believe me the self-esteem is taking a beating. :-( Whose problem is this, the child’s, the teacher’s? The problem lies in the teacher’s instruction. The teacher is going for quantity and not quality…let’s move through the material, cover all those Standards…for the state…What good is that?…So the key here for comprhension is familiarity to the vocabulary of the material presented and lots interactive processes to help the children truly comprehend the material.