Okay my husband and I just had it out over something that seems totally ridiculous to me. My step daughter is 11 years old and is borderline mentally impaired with undiagnosed learning disabilities. We home school her because she was falling through the cracks in public school.
So here is the issue. When doing reading we take turns reading out loud to each other. I will read a few pages and then she will read a few pages. My husband feels this is totally innapproriate and that she is learning nothing by my reading to her. He feels that since she is 11 years old she should be reading it all on her own and that I should not be helping her at all. I feel differently…very differently.
Her reading skills were horrid when we first started home schooling. When we started she would ramble all her words together and not pausing where punctuation marks indicated she should. She would read an entire paragraph and not be able to tell you what it was about. In the last year she has improved and I think that my modeling good reading to her has helped. She does better about reading and understanding what she is reading because she is no longer jumbling up all the sentences. My husband feels it is a complete and total waste of time. So I ask you all…..is there any benefit to my reading out loud with her? I think he is completely out of line and he thinks that I am babying her too much. So honestly, what are your opinions???
Re: Reading questions....Am I doing a good thing?
Reading to the student (child or even adult) by a person, tape recorder, or computer is often recommended for people with reading disabilities. The person is able to gain the content of age appropriate and more interesting material than he/she could gain by reading for themselves. Also I have recommended it to parents, as I think reading without all the skills intact just reinforces a habit of guessing at unfamilar words which I am trying to break. What does your husband mean, “gets nothing out of it?” This would only be true if the content was not understandable to the student.
—des
Re: Reading questions....Am I doing a good thing?
I work as a tutor and I do alternate reading all the time. Usually the student reads a page and I read a page. If the book is very challenging for the student, we each do a paragraph or two.
Doing this *along with* teaching phonics and other things, I have helped many students raise their reading from Grade 2 level to Grade 4-5 level in six months or so. Yes, it definitely works.
When I am reading, I read as slowly as possible to keep normal expression, I put in a lot of expression, and I follow the words with a pen. I glance at the student’s eyes from time to time and make sure they are following along my pen. Just this modelling and following teaches the student to track properly instead of circling the eyes randomly as many guessers do.
You will get even more benefit from this if you do two things: 1. make the divisions of who reads what stricter, not “a few pages” but one for her and one for you, so you don’t slip into reading more and more; and 2. use a good phonics program and/or good phonetically-based spelling program to teach her to read more independently.
As far as what to tell your husband, (a) tell him a number of experienced teachers who work successfully with students like your daughter recommend this method; and (b) count the number of pages your daughter reads *by herself* in a day — if you do a twenty-page chapter alternating strictly, well, she did ten — and tell him how many she is doing and how she is reading more and more by herself.
reading aloud
My son is 12 years old and severely dyslexic. If we are reading age appropiate materials for information or enjoyment I always read aloud to him. The effort and focus required for him to attempt to read these books himself do not allow for any comprehension. In order to make sure
he’s “getting it” I frequently stop and ask questions about what I have just read (non-fiction) or ask for chapter summaries and predictions about what will happen next (fiction). My husband also used to give me a very hard time about this until I started encouraging him to have discussions with our son about what we have been reading. Dad now feels a little less left out and sees the benefits of his son’s growning font of knowledge.
reading aloud
My 13 yr. old is dsylexic and reading doesn’t come easy. Is it possible that your husband is worried, not so much about the reading out loud, but that his child will never learn to read by himself? I read out loud to my child for years when she was younger, but I was really worried because she wasn’t learning to read by herself at school. The Wilson Reading Program has helped immensely, or any multi-sensory program might help. We still do the read-aloud, however, she is now three grades above where she was before the multi-sensory reading program.
Re: Reading questions....Am I doing a good thing?
What you are doing it excellent! I definitely do this with my own child as well as my students. Please tell your husband that you are using a very appropriate method for a child with learning problems. Sounds like this is a very lucky little girl to have you teaching her!
Janis
Me Too
Taking turns reading is a tried and true part of good reading instruction. What other skill do you teach, and not *model* often and well for teh student? When you’re reading, the student is hearing correct pronunciation, expression, phrasing,etc; I work with far too many studetns who have no idea whatsoever what real “reading” is, and that the book is telling a story and isn’t just the prop for some strange ritual teachers and parents invent so they can guess an answer to a question.
That said, it’s not complete; just about everybody needs instruction in the how-to part as well. You can show me how to do butterfly and it will be wonderful… but if I’m going to do it, you need to tell me how to do the kick and the arms and the butt part of butterfly…
Re: Reading questions....Am I doing a good thing?
Right on, Sue.
I am pleased to see celebrities reading to children. I would be more pleased to see the children reading to them.
reading aloud
I regularly read aloud to my boys (ages 9 and 12). They both are all A students and read independently. Sometimes, I “tire” and they take over for a paragraph or two. We talk and share ideas as we read. I wouldn’t give away the time I have had doing this for the world.
Ken Campbell, author, Great Leaps Reading
Re: Reading questions....Am I doing a good thing?
Thank you for letting me know that I am doing this right. Currently we are reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I tried my husbands way for a couple of days and had her read a chapter by herself and it would take her between 3 and 4 hours total to read 20 pages. The first few pages would go fine until she started getting tired and then she would start stumbling over words and having to go back and read sentences over and over to understand what was actually said in the sentence. When we do alternate reading we are usually done with a chapter in about an hour. She reads until she starts stumbling over simple words (usually after 3 or 4 pages) and then I pick up and read a 2-3 pages to give her a break. Then she picks back up where I left off and reads more pages and we do that all throughout the chapter.
When we first started doing this she hated reading out loud. Because in public school kids would tease her about having to sound out words that they already knew. So when we started reading the Harry Potter series….she would have her book and I would have my book and we would curl up on the couch and read. Then with words I knew she would have problems with I would stumble with them and 9 times out of 10 she would jump in and sound out the words for me. :roll: I hoped that by doing that I was teaching her that it is okay not to know every word and that it was okay to sound things out.
For once in her life she is reading on her own. It doesn’t matter to me if it is magazines, comic books, reading blues clues books to her little brother (4 years old) or reading her Mary Kate and Ashley books in bed at night. I am just pleased to see that she is reading voluntarily. She has requested that we read the Lord of the Rings trilogy this upcoming year but I think I might put that one off a little while and let her read C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia first and let her read The Hobbit. The Order of The Phoenix is a difficult read for her now but she is determined to find out what happens. And I don’t think tackling LOTR immediatley after finishing OoTP would be a good idea. I think it might be best to let her read some easier type books for a little while before we start in on LOTR. Tolkien’s style of writing may be difficult for her to get used too.
My husband felt that by her not reading every word by herself that she was missing out on what was going on in the books but I know better. When we get done reading a chapter I ask her questions about it and 95% of the time she tells me the correct answer even down to the smallest details and then she usually askes me a hundred question trying to get info out of me. She knows I have read the book several times and know what is coming up so she tries to be sneaky and get me to tell her what is going to happen in the upcoming chapters. So I will just continue with my method and tell my husband to stuff a sock in it.
He lost his job a couple months ago and has been under our feet constantly and has criticized the way I am teaching her every chance he gets. He is still in the mindset that home schooling should be like public school and it’s not. If we are studying adjectives and she understands it then fine we move onto adverbs or pronouns or whatever is next in the book. When she struggles with something we slow done and take our time with it. It took us a solid month of daily work for her to grasp the concept of multiplying by a 2 digit number. We work at her pace and she is grasping things at her pace. Yes we may still be working on long division while the kids in the neighborhood that are in the same grade are doing adding and subtracting fractions but I just keep telling her that we will get there when we get there and not to worry about it. Some days it’s frustrating because I don’t understand what is causing her to struggle so much but in the end we manage to get past it and get things straightened out in her head to were she understands it. Like when we were working with subtracting with borrowing….I broke that down to the simplest form that I could possibly think of and used manipulatives with her to try and help and then one day she just looked up at me and said mom I think I know how to do this and started explaining how she had figured out how to do it and her thinking made no sense to me at all but it made sense to her and well that’s all that matters. As long as she understands it then it really doesn’t matter how baffling her explanation is to me. So thank you all and I’ll quit babbling now.
Re: Reading questions....Am I doing a good thing?
Your methods sound right on. We’ll get there when we get there is THE most important thing in teaching math. Sure the kids in public school are “doing” fractions — wanna bet how many actually understand and will remember them? For the next three years they’ll be “doing” fractions over and over and still not understanding them, and your daughter will get them right the first time.
Yes, Narnia books would be a great next step. I’m sure she would enjoy them. Then the Hobbit, then Lord of the Rings — do you know how much *more* real reading that is than almost any school program?
Maybe encourage the husband to make up some self-employment and get him too busy?
As a tutor this is a technique I frequently use with older students, like your daughter. Often they cannot sustain the mental energy to read and comprehend an age-appropriate story. This way they can continue to enjoy the story (which is what it is about really) while being supported by a competent adult. I do page and page about. The last one I did was ’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ with a 12 year old boy, lterature he would never have tackled on his own.
Hope you and your husband son see eye to eye!
JAC