Helping 4th grader with reading

I’d start by reading outloud to her every time you’re with her. When you read, be expressive. Choose a fun book, something that can be read in a lively manner. Stop and enjoy the book together. See if she understands what is read to her.

Model a passage (sentence for her), read it with her, then have her read it alone. Reward expression. Question per sentence.

Hi, my name is Teresa Sewell, I have a son Hunter who is 9 years old and has the same problem with reading, he is an excellent reader he just reads in monotones, no change in voice inflection or anything, he has the same problem with reading comprehension because he does not understand what he reads, I have tried reading outloud to him and choosing fun type books but this doesn’t seem to help him any, he just still reads in monotones. Can anyone offer any suggestions to this problem. Thanks Teresa

Hi,

I have a hunch as to what’s going on, but first, do these kids know what the story line is when you read the story instead of having them read it? That is, do they have a similar problem with their comprehension when they are listening to someone else read? Or, do they then follow the story just fine?…Rod

my son understands what is read to him, particularly one on one. When he reads, he uses the same monotone voice described, reads VERY fast, and totally ignores all punctuation to boot. Comprehension sucks

I’ll try to explain in more detail. What you want the student to do is SLOW down, read a passage with expression. It a sentence is not read with expression, go back. Read that sentence to the student. Exagerrate expression 10% - have them read that sentence with you. Then have them read it alone. If they can read the words, they can be taught to intonate. This exercise should only take one to two minutes daily.

Hi marycas,

Ken is likely right about a means to improve the “sound” of your son’s reading, i.e., his expression.

My comments are addressed to the comprehension aspect. If your son understands a story read to him, but does not comprehend a story he is reading (assuming the content and syntax are not above his reading level now), then I suspect that he is strictly a sight-word reader. That is, he probably doesn’t have a good grasp of the phonetic structure of English.

What happens to these kids (and some adults too) is that they have various “tricks” for remembering many words and all these mnemonic devices get in the way of comprehension. Once they understand the phonetic structure, and start to read using the phonics inherent in English, they free up mental resources for comprehension.

Ironically, the whole-language/balanced literacy groups lay the blame for such reading on phonics instruction itself, but this, in my experience, is very unlikely. When a child begins to base their reading strategy on decoding, they find it much easier to move toward automatic word recognition quickly and then are able to comprehend what the writer is saying without a lot of re-reading.

I’ve actually worked with an adult over 50 who read college level material very slowly, but accurately when he came to me. He had to re-read continually to get the message. After 10 or so hours of phonetic training, he said he was reading much, much faster than before, yet I could detect very little difference in his oral reading style…..Rod

P.S. Of course, if your son knows and uses phonics as his primary strategy when reading, and you’re certain of this, then something else is going on.

I am optimistic. I did phono-graphix with him myself over the summer-we didnt get through it all-but his decoding scores went up significantly. Still a ways to go-and the comprehension has a long ways to grow-but this tutor is a SLP with reading training and is doing a variety of approaches with phonics and mouth formation included. She feels the same as you do about his issues

He hates it(says its more boring than school) but I am hopeful.

I’m with Rod totally on this one. In my experience, well over 90% of the “poor comprehension” problems I meet are actually “very very poor reading skills” problems.

Look at it this way: every person has a “memory bank” that can hold only a certain number of words — seven or so disconnected words, maybe ten to twenty in a logical sentence.

A student with good phonics skills may read very very slowly if he is a beginner, but he reads the words that are there and are meaningful and connected:

Here
is
a
sss
sss - qu
sss- qu - ir
squirrel
with
a
bush
bushy
tail.

The student can keep a picture of the squirrel with the big tail in his head, and he understands what “bushy” means from the menaing of the sentence.

Now the sight “reader” (so-called) does this

How
Here
is
and
the
a
cat?
dog?
tree?
(you tell him to sound it out)
start?
(you give him the blend squ)
squeeze?
(you give him squirrel)
squirrel
what
(you stop him and make him go back)
with
the
busy?
Billy?
(you give him bu…)
burning?
(you give him bushy)
bushy
tail

This kid has a bunch of pictures floating in his head, several animals, squeezing, busy bees, a kid called Billy, something burning, and a tail. He has no idea whatever what is going on here. He can’t go back and recite the sentence over to himself because his short-term memory bank is so filled up with wrong guesses that there is no room for the correct words. His comprehension is going to be zero.
If the student is “reading” silently (quotation marks because the definition of reading as getting meaning from print has completely broken down at the meaning part) , the same process of multiple strange guesses and word replacement goes on in his head. Silent “reading” is no improvement, in fact generally is actively counterproductive in this situation, because the student is practicing the same mistakes with even less correction. Comprehension will be if possible even worse. Unless there is a picture to guess from, a teacher or parent to con into giving the answers, or a neighbour to copy from.

Often if the student has been taught to “read” silently by guesswork, he does not even know what he is doing wrong. He is working very hard, doing exactly what he was taught to do, apparently as far as he or anyone else can see exactly the same thing as his classmates, but the magic spell that makes them get meaning out of books never worked for him. Some students will claim that they read “just fine” silently, and it is only the stupid tutor’s insistence on this crazy oral reading that is making them make mistakes — the low test scores, incredible spelling, and being laughed at for misinterpretations in class are a mystery, or caused by the teacher hating them.

The usual cure, in 90% of cases, is to teach reading skills: basic phonics first, but also advanced phonics, syllables, and use of punctuation.

The lack of intonation most often comes from two things: first, the words are being fished out of the memory banks by a complex and painful process. Each word floats up as a completely separate entity, disconnected from everything. Second, most of these students have no clue whatever about punctuation. Usually they don’t even look at it. Often they have been taught not to look at it. Punctuation has usually been taught as very much of an afterthought that you throw into the final draft of writing — they have often been taught that punctuation is unimportant in the first draft.
The solution is to teach reading as scanning left-to-right and looking at every symbol. This requires un-teaching the hurry up and guess habit that is often taught. Not easy, but possible.

Teaching intonation by itself will work if that is the *only* problem. If as is much more common the student is lacking in those basic skills, teaching intonation alone will be very frustrating.