Reading - 3 essential elements
Reading is so important to functioning in our society. Without the ability to read signs, instructions and forms, it's nearly impossible to perform a job well. Without the ability to read a book, a person loses out on one of life's great pleasures. By giving up on a child at some point and giving them text-to-speech or a reader, denies them a full future. You may say that you have tried everything but still the child can't or won't learn to read, but there may be a few stones still left unturned. I will cover many of these least used methods during this month, but this week I will concentrate on the 3 basics.
First, I wanted to tell you about the boy who was told he could never read. When he was born, the cord was wrapped around his neck, depriving the left hemisphere of his brain of oxygen. Since the left hemisphere is responsible for moving the right side of the body, he limped and had no use of his right hand. Also, the left hemisphere is responsible for language. He could talk, but when I met him he couldn't read.
Never say never. The first summer that I worked with him, we did cognitive training to improve memory, attention, processing speed, logic and more. The second summer I taught him to read, using the method in the book, Reading Reflex by McGuinness. That was it. He was a reader. If he could improve his brain functioning that much, so can your child or students.
Essential element number 1: Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is the ability to deal with the sounds, or phonemes, in our language. Someone who does not have this ability hears words, but has trouble figuring out what the sounds are, or can't easily move the sounds around. They can hear the sounds, but can't easily process them. Although this has nothing to do with letters, it is essential to being able to read words that you don't know, like a person's last name that you are not familiar with, or medical terms.
One part of phonemic awareness is the ability to blend sounds into words. When I am teaching someone blending, I say the sounds of the word, not the letters, one at a time. The student puts them together in his head and says the word. For example, for the word love, there are only three sounds - lll uh vvv. Each sound is abbreviated and does not include too much extraneous sounds. The sound for the letter v is vvvv, not vuh.
Another part of phonemic awareness is segmenting - pulling apart the sounds in a word. I say what are the sounds in ant, the student says aaa nnn t (with as little breath at the end as possible). This is important for breaking apart blends.
It is so important to be able to deal with these individually, rather than together so that the student has the fewest building blocks as possible. There are 44 sounds in the English language, which most people can deal with. However, there are about 1500 letter combinations - to many for a teacher to teach or for a struggling student to learn.
The final part of phonemic awareness is sound manipulation. To read quickly and efficiently, a person should be able to insert sounds, delete sounds, and reverse sounds. For some reason, most of the kids I have taught blend all g's with l's or r's. So, when blending the sounds g aaa sss, she might say glass or grass. She needs to be able to efficiently remove the lll or the rrr.
In Growing Brains Everyday, which is on a fire sale this weekend, there is full phonemic awareness including blending, segmenting, vowel substitution, phoneme manipulation, and rapid naming. A dyslexia teacher in Texas who also is a Brain Advancement Coach, said it was the best program for phonemic awareness that she has seen.
Essential Element Number 2: Know the Code
"The Code" is the translation of the letters and letter combinations into sounds. I always teach phonemic awareness first until it is actually easy to do. Then I start teaching the code.
I never use letter names. Ever. I know that seems counter intuitive, since most everyone else does, but I find it only slows down the process. I am helping people who have had a difficult time reading, so I need to help them get up to speed as quickly as possible. It takes too much time and effort to say "This is a t; it stand for train; the first sound in train is t". Instead, I teach the method out the book mentioned above, Reading Reflex. It teaches sounds only, as represented by one or more letters. The method is easy to learn, easy to teach, and I usually get though teaching the code in just 4 to 6 weeks, an hour a day.
Yes that is all it takes as long as there are no other big blocks. I will be writing about those blocks in the coming weeks.
Essential Element #3: Comprehension
It is all fine and good that a person can easily sound out words, but what if they cannot comprehend what was just read?
There are a few reasons for poor reading comprehension. The first reason is that it is so difficult to read the words that the brain's energy is taken up with the reading, and nothing is left over for comprehension. What could make this happen? Poor decoding skills or vision issues (like double vision) take so long to figure out what the words actually are, leaving nothing left to remember what was read.
The second problem could be that the reader, who reads the words fine, is a concrete thinker - and has poor logic and reasoning. A concrete thinker only knows exactly what is said to him or the words that are written. He cannot deduce meaning or go beyond those words. By the way, this can be taught. It does not have to be life-long. I help students with this through reflex integration and Brain Advancement Coaching.
The final issue causing poor comprehension could be poor visualization. Most people, when reading a novel, have a movie going on in their heads. When recalling what happened in the book, they simply rerun the movie - they visualize it. I have used an excellent book, Visualization and Verbalization by Lindamood-Bell, it takes only 2 to 3 weeks before the student can remember and summarize passages.
These are the 3 essential elements to reading, but there are many other possible blocks to being able to read well. We have to look at why a person may not easily be able to be aware of phonemes, why a person has trouble learning the code, or what is stopping comprehension. We will explore them in the next couple of weeks.
60% off Growing Brains Everyday download
48 hour sale, Friday midnight to Sunday midnight, Eastern Time.
The print version is $149.99; the download will be only $59.99!!
Be sure to get Growing Brains Everyday this weekend, if you would like a curriculum that is completely mapped out for you to teach someone what is needed for reading, writing, and math success. It includes a copy of the reflex integration program, Maintaining Brains and is geared for Kindergarten through 2nd grade Gen Ed, or K-5 Special Ed. There are 150 days of lessons, and each lesson takes 10 minutes, but allowing for more time as needed.
If you want to do this in one summer's time, say 8 weeks, 5 days a week, you have 40 days to complete 150 lessons. There are 5 sections of 30 days each. As the 30 days start easy and get progressively more difficult (although very slowly), do the first lesson of all 5 sections on Day 1, taking about an hour. Feel free to break it up throughout the day, but know that the lessons are meant to be short and engaging. Each day is numbered, so on day 15 you will do day 15 from each section. This will give you 10 days at the end for summary, working on a challenging area or to move on to the code.
Here is what you will be working on:
Phonemic Awareness
Primitive Reflex Integration for Brain Development
Visual Processing - tracking, convergence
Body work - core strength, balance and coordination, crossing the midline
Cognitive skills - sequencing, working memory, processing speed
Academics - telling time, math facts, handwriting, idea writing, reading fluency
How does it get done in so little time? By working developmentally and developing the brain first. This curriculum IS the Pyramid of Potential.
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