Children who read well are building a bridge to a successful future. This means better grades, reading more, learning more, and performing better in school, college and university. Children who enjoy reading develop a powerful love of reading. They read after hours. They read books on the weekend. They simply love reading.
Children who read slowly and with difficulty are trapped another world, the world of the "slow reader". They read the bare essentials; only what is absolutely necessary at school. They are unlikely to read after hours. Reading is tiring, difficult, frustrating, and slow. They often have low confidence when reading. It is well known that children who fall behind in their reading, fall further behind later on. A study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that most of the children who had reading problems in the third grade continued to have problems in the 9th grade. Children with reading problems grow up to become adults with reading difficulties as well. The chance of completing a four year college degree is around 2% for a student who has suffered lifelong reading problems.
These are two different worlds, the world of the slow reader and the world of the fast, accurate and confident child. So, how do we build reading confidence and transform a problem reader into a fast and accurate reader? We reveal all in this newsletter, and present some practical tuition techniques that make a huge difference to young readers.
Many people suspect that children who read poorly are somehow lazy. This is often incorrect. A child that reads slowly and with difficulty is often doing around four times more visual and mental work to read the same amount of information as a good child reader. When you put a lot of work into an activity, and you get very little out of it, tiredness and frustration sets in. It's very hard to persevere when you are frustrated and tired. Let.s consider an example with the following sentence.
"The naughty dog sneaked up and made away with a cup cake."
The slow reader may require 15 eye movements and 15 eye fixations to absorb this sentence. If their eyes skip back to earlier words, then this skip back may cause additional eye movements and fixations, eg a total of 25 eye movements and 25 eye fixations. This is equivalent to 50 eye operations just to read a simple sentence. A fast and accurate child might read this sentence with just 7 eye movements and 7 fixations with no skip back. This is 14 eye operations which takes a fraction of the effort. And because the faster child can read a sentence much quicker the ideas in the sentence are fresh, and they can often understand it thoroughly. However, slower child may have forgotten the ideas in the first half of the sentence by the time the read the second half, because they are working so hard, and it is taking much longer. Hence the slower child is much more likely to understand less of what they read.
Children are under a lot of pressure. By the second and third grade, already they are expected to learn to read story books and become fluent and comprehend what they read. A child that can see that they are not as well as the others in their class can quickly become demoralized. This adds to the problem.
One-on-one reading. Make time for your child. Read to them. Let them read to you. Help them with their reading.