Hi, I am new here and have some questions in regards to reading. My apologizes if this is posted in the wrong area.
My son is in 5th grade and has diffuculty with reading. He reads wonderfully and has always been above in reading itself. His problem stems from reading and having to answer questions about what he’s read. The information just gets lost somewhere between reading and the paper.
His teacher this year has commented that he adds words or phrases that are not there in text. I’m concerned cause now it’s really starting to affect his grades and I don’t want to watch him downslide when I know that he has the potential to do well….this is holding him back.
I’m confused as to how to help him and/or if there may be some underlying learning disability that we are unaware of.
If you have any insight or suggestions to offer I would GREATLY appreciate them.
Thanks!
Re: New member...HELP!
I agree with Nancy’a analysis. When I see this pattern, it is usually creative guessing. Re-teaching phonics from the ground up will take time and work, and he is likely to resist it because he thinks he already knows all that, but persevere, the results are worth it.
Reading Reflex has a good reputation with many excellent teachers around here. Personally I use a tried-and-true workbook series that is also very very inexpensive and which has the advantage of having all the lessons and the student work laid out for you in detail (but you still have to actively *teach* them).
If you would like my collected outlines on how to tutor, now up to a book in progress, please email a request to [email protected]
Another idea
Dear Mom of 1:
As a teacher with experience in both regular and special education/remedial classrooms, I would like to add a couple of things before this you buy books or assume it is a decoding problem.
If your child is truly interested in what they are reading, does he still make the same kinds of mistakes? Tell me what kind of words he adds—are they significant or things that seem to twist the sentence to fit his grammatical thinking without changing the meaning too much?
Don’t be too quick to rule out attention as the problem.
As a huge multi-sensory phonics proponent, I don’t wish to downplay decoding—those who know me would know me as someone who can teach multisensory phonics quite well. However, in my early teaching days, I made mistakes in judgment and often thought poor phonics were the problem when it was something else.
Up the ante a bit—offer some token (but interesting) reward if your child can read a 100-150 word passage without error. Have him read aloud to you and record the errors and the time it took to read it. Then post the passage (with the name of the book) and the errors here. We might have to do this a couple of times, but I think we’ll discover some interesting things about how he reads.
Re: New member...HELP!
I agree - find out a little more. Get him to read to you and see just what “always reads well” really means. Let us know if he “adds words.” It is worth seeing what he does when he’s just supposed to read, and what he does when he’s highly motivated to really focus. (Don’t confuse this with “trying harder” - it’s not exactly the same.)
SOmetimes bright kids “read well” because they’re so smart they can compensate for not knowing what the words are; some “read well” but impose their own meanings onto the text (they’re *too* good at ‘making inferences.’) It works really well in the younger grades because things *are* predictable - and then explodes if they’re expected to read more challenging material. (However, if they’re shuttled down into the lower levels, they can continue with that ineffective strategy - they just have their futures rather limited and they tend to, oh, believe the best sales pitch instead of knowing how to think critically. Impacts their voting decisions… Welcome to public school…, but ramblin’ time’s over…)
Re: New member...HELP!
Great suggestions all the way around! Posting the passage with errors is a great idea, Susan! And of course, Nancy, I would agree with Reading Reflex and REWARDS, other than I think ABeCeDarian (www.abcdrp.com) is superior for actually teaching decoding skills over Reading Reflex/Phono-Graphix. Reading Reflex is good for the explanation and pre-testing, though.
Attention problems crossed my mind, too. But I think seeing a grade level passage with errors might reveal whether it is a decoding problem or not.
To the mom: time how many words he reads correctly in one minute on a grade level passage as well…one he hasn’t read previously. Just have him read, you make a note of the number of errors, stop him after one minute, count the number of words he read and subtract the errors. This gives you a words-correct-per-minute (wcpm) measurement.
Janis
It’s hard to tell from your post if his difficulty is with decoding or with comprehension. It’s possible for a child to *appear* to be decoding really well up until 5th grade but in actuality using visual memory and inspired guessing instead. On the other hand, it’s possible for a child to decode well and still have comprehension problems.
What I find disturbing is the teacher’s comment that he adds words or phrases that are not in the text. This, to me, indicates a guessing problem — that he is not really reading the text, but instead guessing at the text based on a variety of strategies that do not involve decoding.
What I would suggest as a starting point is going to the library and getting a copy of Reading Reflex by McGuiness (or purchase a copy at any bookstore for under $20). Read the first three chapters, and then give your son the assessments in the book. This will give you a lot of information about where he is with decoding skills. If he does not score grade-appropriate on these assessments, he has a decoding problem. If this is the case, my suggestion would be to find a Phono-Graphix tutor (PG is the approach described in Reading Reflex), as this is a fast method of remediation.
If the Reading Reflex assessments turn out okay, then I would suggest that you work one-on-one with your son at home using the Rewards program from Sopris West (http://www.rewardsreading.com , but order by phone as their website is impossible to navigate for ordering purposes). If he is actually decoding at a 4th grade level or better, then the original Rewards program would be best. If he is lower than that, then their newer Intermediate program would be the best choice.
The original Rewards has 20 lessons that are entirely scripted and are very easy for a parent to do at home. The entire program can be done in under 30 hours total, and is very effective at developing multi-syllable word attack skills. Intermediate Rewards is broken down into 40 individual lessons. It works on the same skills as the original Rewards but with an easier level of vocabulary.
Comprehension problems are different. You really want to be sure about decoding skills before tackling comprehension. It sounds as if your son may have “fallen through the cracks” when it came to picking up decoding skills at school, so I would check that issue out first. It does not sound like a learning disability to me, but more like “dysteachia”.
Nancy