The Five Finger Rule--Choosing a "Just Right" Book

How do you help a child to choose an appropriate book to read?  Unfortunately many children, especially young or struggling readers, want to read books beyond their ability.  A Harry Potter book may be very intriguing, but most young or struggling readers couldn't read it successfully and would just become frustrated if they tried. 

The first step in selecting an appropriate book is to have the child look at it, read the title and see if it looks appealing.  A book that is simply not appealing is going to be a tough sell, regardless of how well a child can read it.

The next step is to turn to a random page in the book and have the child read it.  The child will hold up one finger for every word he struggles with or simply can't decode.  If the child holds up 0 to 1 fingers, the book is too easy.  If the child holds up 4 or 5 fingers, the book is too difficult and an easier book should be selected.  But...if the child holds up 2 to 3 fingers, the book is at just the right level of difficulty!

The final step is to talk with the child about the book.  Does the child understand what he just read?  Can he read it fluently or is his reading slow and choppy?  Is it interesting?  If a book has met all of these criteria, congratulations; you have found a "just right" book!

Misty

P.S.  If a child insists on a book that is too difficult, read it with him.  You can read it to him or share reading with each of you reading a page or a paragraph and you helping the child with any difficult words.  Our goal is for children to learn to love reading.  This can only happen if they are taught how to avoid frustrating books and find ones that they will enjoy.

Back-to-School Tips

Last weekend's USA Weekend (the one in our local Sunday paper) included an article entitled "Your A+Back-to-School Action Plan".  I found many of the suggestions to be a good annual check-up for education specialists as well.

The author, Peg Tyre, makes the following suggestions:

• "Make contact with teachers by Week 3."  Hopefully, we already have open lines of communication with our families.   Even so, back-to-school is a good time for a refresher; check-in with your families and evaluate whether there are any families with which you don't have good communication.  If so, what can you do to try to improve it?  
• "Check that your child is reading at grade level."  While our students may not be reading at grade level yet, we do need to regularly check each student's progress.  We have to make sure that our individual intervention plan is helping the student to demonstrate expected growth.  If not, it's time to modify our plan.
• "Understand the importance of downtime."  I know that I find the need to take an occasional mental break, especially during a particularly challenging task.  Recent research on the brain indicates that dyslexic students exert at least 4-5 times as much energy during reading as non-dyslexic students.  Students who are working this hard must have an occasional mental break, so recognize the value in playing a quick game or reading a poem or a few pages from a story. 
• " Analyze test scores".  In this, Tyre suggests that parents look at the overall school philosophy; are they all about test prep activities or are they focused on "helping kids understand, analyze and write about complex subjects"?  This, too, should be our focus. 
•  "Stay on track for college".  My first thought was to skip this tip, but we are preparing our students for college and/or careers.  How?  By empowering these students to be self-motivated active learners; the most important skills they need to be successful in college or a career.
• "Don't trash-talk about math", or any other subject.  Recent brain research reinforces what we have often told students; you can do anything you set your mind to doing.  If we can show a student success in an area that has been challenging, like reading, the student can build on that success.  Similarly, we have to be very careful that our students do not develop negative associations with learning; those negative associations are just as powerful as the positive ones, if not more so. 
• "Be part of the learning community".  How are parents involved with your work with their students?  Are they empowered to assist with the work you are doing with their students?  Similarly, are you continuing your own education through classes, workshops or conferences to demonstrate to the students your own commitment to learning?

An annual review of your program will help you stay on track.  Back-to-school time can be a good reminder for that review.

Misty

 Image courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What Is the LiPS Program?

 

Now that I’ve announced that I’m trained in the LiPS Program, what is it?  The LiPS Program is designed to develop phonemic awareness.  Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are composed of individual sounds (phonemes) and that the sounds within words can be manipulated to change the words.  For example, if you change the first phoneme of “cat” to a “b”, you get “bat”, then, if you change the middle phoneme to an “i”, you get “bit”, and if you change the last phoneme to a “g”, you get “big”.  Frequently, a student hears a word as just one unit that cannot be changed, which creates a lot of difficulty in reading.   As Patricia Lindamood and Phyllis Lindamood, the authors of the LiPS program, explain in the LiPS Program Teacher's Manual, “For students who lack phonemic awareness — the ability to think about and manipulate the individual sounds within spoken words – phonics information and rules appear to have no logic.”  So, trying to teach phonics to a student who does not have phonemic awareness is very difficult.

One unique aspect of the LiPS Program, and the piece that I consider to be most valuable to struggling students, is a focus on how sounds FEEL.  When you are working with a student who is having difficulty hearing the individual sounds in a word, asking them to say the word again and tell you what sounds they heard is very difficult.  If they could hear the individual sounds, they probably wouldn’t be struggling.  What the LiPS Program teaches a student to do is to become keenly aware of how each sound feels, in their mouth, their throat, and even in their nose.  For example, /p/ and /b/ are called “brother sounds” because the mechanics of making the two sounds are the same; you pop your lips (hence the reason they are called “lip poppers”) and release a short burst of air.  The only difference between the two sounds is that the /p/ is unvoiced and the /b/ is voiced.  (Feel your throat while you say each sound and you will feel it.)  So, if a student tries to read a word and substitutes a “d” for a “b”, the teacher can ask the student to feel what his or her mouth is doing for that sound.  In this example, the student’s lips are not popping, so he or she needs to take another look how that word is read.

When a student is having difficulty hearing the sounds in a word, it just makes so much more sense to teach them how to feel that word than to keep trying to get them to hear it in the same way.  Once they learn to feel the difference, hearing the difference will be much easier.

Misty

LiPS Program

As I write this, I am in San Luis Obispo attending a three-day training on the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing® (LiPS®) Program.  The LiPS program is recommended by Susan Barton as an intervention for children who are not able to pass the Barton Screening and are, therefore, not yet ready for the Barton Program.  LiPS can help fill in the necessary gaps for a child to be successful in the Barton Program.

The Lindamood-Bell website offers the following description of the LiPS Program:

Problem

John is unable to read and spell words to his potential.  He has been labeled "dyslexic" or "learning disabled."  Despite numerous attempts to teach him, John cannot decode written words and has to guess from memory or context cues.

 

Cause

A primary cause of decoding and spelling problems is difficulty in judging sounds within words. This is called weak phonemic awareness.  This weakness in phonological processing causes individuals to omit, substitute, and reverse sounds and letters within words. This is also a cause of difficulty in learning a second language. Individuals with weak phonological processing cannot get the words off the page: they cannot judge whether what they say matches what they see. 

Symptoms

Many children and adults have difficulty judging sounds within words.  Although they see letters correctly, they cannot detect and correct their errors in reading and spelling.  This causes:

• Weak Decoding--Errors such as "steam" for stream, "imagination" for immigration, "claps" for clasps, etc.
• Weak Spelling--Errors such as "gril" for girl, "cret" for correct, "equetment" for equipment, etc.
• Pronunciation Errors--Errors such as "death" for deaf, "flusterated" for frustrated, etc.

Solution

The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing® (LiPS®) Program successfully stimulates phonemic awareness.  Individuals become aware of the mouth actions which produce speech sounds. This awareness becomes the means of verifying sounds within words and enables individuals to become self-correcting in reading and spelling, and speech.

Misty

http://www.lindamoodbell.com/lindamood%20phoneme%20sequencing%20reading%20phonemic%20awareness%20phonics%20dyslexia%20dyslexic.aspx

Don't Forget Dr. Seuss

"Roses are red, violets are blue...."  I'm pretty sure we all know that little poem.  But somewhere along the line, it seems like many of our children have forgotten how to rhyme.

It seems that, more often than not, the students who come to me for extra reading support do not know how to rhyme.  So, why is this important?  Understanding onset (the initial consonant or consonant blend of a word) and rime (the vowel and the consonants that follow it) is a critical skill in developing phonological awareness, one of the foundations of reading.  Children do not learn to read words until they first learn to pull apart the individual sounds in a word.  Pull them apart first to get the concept, then learn how to put them back together.

So, what has happened to rhyming?  I have a theory that is, in no way, research-based; just based upon my own observations.  It seems to me that perhaps we are such a "sophisticated" society these days, that we don't need to worry about things like reading Dr. Seuss to our children.  Hop on Pop is cliche; we've all read it a million times.  But have our children?  Books like that are perfect for early readers...or even pre-readers.  Children love books that are predictable and repetitive.  They can learn to "read" them, or at least parts of the books, by themselves.  In doing so, they begin to understand our alphabetic system.  Even more importantly, they learn to play with words by changing the beginning sounds.  Change the /h/ in "hop" to /p/ and you have "pop".  Thus we have the beginnings of onset and rime.

As the child eagerly fills in the words that you leave out when you are reading and come up with other rhyming words that could fit in that same spot, they learn how much fun they can have with reading.  A love for reading will lead to a desire to read more, which will ultimately lead to fluent reading.  In the words of Dr. Seuss, from I Can Read With My Eyes Shut, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”

Misty

Your Baby Can Read--But Why?

As reported by ABC News, "Your Baby Can Read" has shut their doors in light of a possible Federal Trade Commission investigation over false claims.  This is a company that preyed on parents; those from a lower socio-economic status who desperately wanted to give their children a head start, those who wanted to brag about their babies' skills, and those who just believed the company's claims.   At $200 a pop, they purportedly made a fortune off of these parents.

Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Association for the Education of Young Children recommend NO screen time for children under the age of two.  However, if parents followed the instructions of the Your Baby Can Read program, their children would be subjected to as much as 200 hours of screen time in their first two years of life through this program alone.  

Screen time issues aside, is the program valuable?  Yes, an infant can be trained to mimic words that they see printed.  But does this qualify as reading?  I can watch "Dora the Explorer" with my Goddaughter and learn to greet people with "hola".  But does that mean that I can speak Spanish?  Absolutely not.  It's the same idea.  Providing a response to a few words in isolation doesn't make a child a reader any more than Dora makes me a Spanish-speaker.

Reading is  a complicated process that combines aspects of memorization with decoding skills.  An early program that focuses solely on memorization can establish some bad habits in young children.  Many of my reading students have great difficulty with the vowel sounds in words; they often just skip over the letter and inserting whatever vowel sound seems right to them.  This is because they see the word as one whole piece rather than individual sounds that combine to make a word.  Memorization is simply not an effective way to learn to read.

The other, even more basic piece of all of this is:  Why would we want our children sitting in front of television screens when we could be snuggling with them and reading to them?  THIS is how we establish pre-reading skills.  We show children how wonderful it is to read and show them the basics of the alphabetic principle--we read from top to bottom, left to right, letters make distinct sounds that combine to form words, and print represents meaning.  I would much rather my child learn that from warm interactions with me than from my television set.

Misty

Pre-Reading Skills: Teaching Beginning Sounds

Play is a very important aspect of a child's learning.  The same idea applies in developing pre-reading skills.

Some children see a word as a whole rather than as individual letters (or sounds) that combine to form a word.  This makes it difficult to learn to read.  For example, a child may read the word "dug" as "dog" because the words look so similar and the child doesn't notice the difference.

We can help children develop the skills that they need to be able to read by playing language games with them. 

• "My name starts with /m/ (the sound of "m").  Who else's name starts with /m/?"   Move on to other sounds.
• "I'm going on a trip and I'm taking a toothbrush."  Next person--"I'm going on a trip and I'm taking a turtle."  Continue taking turns naming things that start with the same letter until someone has difficulty with the task.  Choose a different letter and start again.
• "We're going to make 'c' soup."  Put soup pot in middle of circle and have a child start stirring it.  Other children come up and pretend to put something in the soup that starts with the target letter.  "I'm putting corn in the soup."  "I'm putting carrots in the soup."  Children can be silly with their ingredients if they want--"I'm putting a camera in the soup."
• Word sort--provide children with pictures that start with one of two different target sounds.  (The target sounds should not be similar--don't use /m/ and /n/ together.)  Children name each picture and sort them into piles of words starting with the same sounds.  For example--one pile will have a picture of a banana, a boat, and a bone, while the other pile will have a picture of a man, a map, and a mop.

Making language fun is one way to help children more readily develop pre-reading skills.  

Misty

Image courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net