By Janice Jones, TLC's Tutoring Supervisor 

Recent research on Reading Fluency has found that having a child read aloud daily is an important way help a child improve fluency-a necessary skill for comprehension.  We have found in tutoring that collaborative reading is a good way to practice this oral reading, and it is an important way that parents can help a student at any level.

Collaborative reading is simply alternating, or taking turns, reading.  First, choose a book or article at the child's reading/decoding level.  In other words, a book in which he can read most of the words independently. Then take turns reading sentences, paragraphs, or pages, depending on the length and difficulty of the reading material. We have used this in tutoring with students of all ages-from beginning readers through high school.  For students who have difficulty with reading, it is a way to make the task seem less overwhelming.  

Sometimes a challenge of parenting is recognizing when your child is capable of understanding and completing school work but is not putting forth effort versus when they are having difficulty learning or understanding the material. When the problem does not seem to be a matter of your child trying harder or when grades decline, parents might look into extra help for the child.

Some red flags that could suggest that there is more going on than lack of effort or motivation include:    

• Inconsistent performance - knowing something one day but not the next
• Excessive resistance to homework, self-disparaging remarks - "I'm stupid, why can't I get this?"
• Difficulty focusing during homework or school work
• A consistent decline in grades

Talking with your child to understand why school work seems more difficult than it should be can provide you with valuable insight into their experiences. Gaining this perspective can help guide the best response. Tutoring can be an effective intervention if your child is having difficulty learning the material in school. If there are more significant concerns or you wonder if there might be something getting in your child's way of processing or understanding the academic material, a more comprehensive evaluation can provide you with valuable information about your child's learning style and effective interventions to take advantage of identified strengths.