Changing the Chronic Literacy Issues in American Schools

Here at Easyread we've been honored to take part in creating a new mini documentary exploring chronic literacy issues in American schools and what can be done to change this.

Rather than focusing on the problem alone, the documentary aims to shed light on the solutions that are already out there helping children. So often we can get wrapped up in diagnosing the problems, but then the process seems to halt. In our experience, once you have pinpointed the underlying cause of difficulty, then applying the targeted solution is so much easier - not to mention more effective! We would always advise looking into possible causal issues in the visual, auditory or memory spheres before launching into a remedial program.

Take a look at the video below to see information from developmental optometrists, reading specialists, parents and children -- all of which gives hope for every struggling reader.

We've poured our heart and soul into helping put this together, so please do share it on your social media pages if you feel its message is a good one!

Sarah Forrest and David Morgan work with children through the Easyread System, an online program for struggling readers with dyslexia, auditory processing weakness, highly visual learning styles, and more. www.easyreadsystem.com

Motivating Discouraged Readers

For many children, playing video games, watching television and participating in other activities is preferred over reading.  In fact, parents and teachers often find themselves coaxing or bribing youngsters to open a book.  So what can be done to make this important activity more appealing?  

Ways to Entice Children to Read:

• Associate Reading with Positive Experiences:  Try to avoid getting upset when your children do not choose to read.  Instead, ignore this behavior and praise them when they do choose to read.
• Make reading a pleasant family bonding experience:  Select a time, daily or weekly, when the family reads together.   Make sure to call this activity a fun name, such as Family Fun or Reading Roundup.  Prepare favorite snacks and drinks, and create an inviting environment by pulling out pillows and blankets so children can make a cozy reading nook.  Family members can read as a group or independently.  Young children that can not read yet, can listen to others read aloud, books on tape or they can play games with text.  For example, they can be given a magazine and encouraged to read from left to right over the text and search for the letter "a." Every time they find it, they should circle it.  They can also be enticed to highlight sight words such as “the,” “said,” and “what.”  These pre-reading activities will help to develop letter and word recognition as well as attention to details and tracking skills. As another option, you can encourage young ones to use an I-Pad or similar device and play with interactive reading apps (see below) or pre-reading activities such as BBC's Syllable Factory Game. 
• Use audio-books:  Listen to books on tape at home or in the car.  Be sure to stop the recording from time to time and discuss your visualizations.  Can you describe the setting?  What do the characters look like?  You can even play games by seeing who has the most accurate and most detailed mental imagery.  Both Learning Alley and Book Share are two sites that offer almost any book of your choosing. You can even set up your children to listen to free audio books online. Here are a few excellent sites:

1. National Geographic Young Explorer 
2. Storynory 
3. Star Fall 
4. Read To Me 

• Share a book: Read the same book that your child is reading.  Encourage your child to highlight any difficult words.  Discuss each chapter to ensure understanding of the vocabulary as well as the content.  You can also discuss predictions and even inferences or hidden meanings.
• Create a fun activity:  If your child like to draw, encourage them to do a drawing for each chapter.  Have them highlight all the things they want to include in their drawing while they are reading. 
• Make sure books are enticing and accessible: Let your kids select their own books and make sure that they are easily accessible.
• Introduce your kids to a series: Read the first book of a series to your child.  Then take turns reading the second book together.  If the book is too hard for them to read, echo read with your child.  When they get hooked, make sure to have the other books in the series on hand. 

I hope you find these ideas helpful!  Do you have any of your own strategies that you would like to share?

 Cheers, Erica

Dr. Erica Warren is the author, illustrator and publisher of multisensory educational materials at Good Sensory Learning and Dyslexia Materials.  She is also the director of Learning to Learn, in Ossining, NY.

Predicting Reading Problems?

Parents often ask: “How do I identify if my child is at risk for developing a reading disability, such as dyslexia?”

At one time, we had to wait until a child was in school and learning to read to identify reading problems.  Now we know that there are risk factors we can identify much earlier.  This lets us intervene when a child is younger and, generally speaking, earlier intervention has better outcomes. 

The early clues to potential reading problems are easy to spot when you know what they are.  All you have to do is listen to your child speak.  

Listen for subtle sounds that tell you your child’s language skills are not developing as they should.  It’s easier than it sounds because fuzzy phonemes (phonemes are the individual sounds that produce words. For example, the word cat has 3 phonemes /c/+/a/+/t/)  leave a distinct mark on everyday language in highly predictable ways by influencing how a child pronounces certain words, sings nursery rhymes, and learns the names of sounds of the letters of the alphabet.

Here are the things to look for:

Clue #1: Delay in Speaking

As a general rule, children speak their first words around their first birthday, use phrases between 18-24 months of age, and can engage in a conversation, tell a short story, and answer “why” questions between their 3rd and 4th birthdays.

Are there signs that your child's speech is delayed: 

• First word at 15+ months?
• Speaking phrases after age 2?
• Having difficulty with conceptual words at age 3 and later such as over/under, before/after, few/more, give/take, left/right?

Clue #2: Pronunciation

Baby talk is appropriate in the first few years of life. However, by age 5 or 6, children should have little trouble pronouncing most words correctly and when they do make errors their mispronunciations should be easy to correct.

• Does your child struggle to pronounce new words or articulate long/complicated words?
• Does he sound like he is tripping over the individual sounds (phonemes) in a word as they come out of his mouth? Or does he leaves sounds out of words?  For example, a child who calls spaghetti “pisgetti” or an elephant “lelephant” long past the age when such words should be spoken correctly.  

Clue #3: Rhyming

What an important skill this is to learn in preschool!  When a child can rhyme, we know that she is able to break words down into the smaller segments of sound that different words can share. This is a strong indicator of getting ready to read and it’s why educational psychologists and educators encourage parents to read nursery rhymes ad nauseam (Oh, so that’s why!).  Children should be able to make rhymes by age 4. 

When a child has early reading problems, he has trouble penetrating the sound structure of words and so is less sensitive to rhyme. Does your child:

• Confuse sounds that sound alike?
• Have trouble hearing the rhyme in a poem or song?

If so, she may not be understanding the phonemes that make two words sounds alike, because she is not understanding that a word is made-up from a sequence of individual sounds.

CLUE #4: Word Retrieval

Word retrieval problems occur when a child knows what he wants to say but cannot pull the right words from his memory.  Does your child:

• Talk around a word so that his speech is punctuated by “umm…” and “uh…”?
• Describe a word but not name it?
• Point instead of speaking?
• Use the wrong phoneme, for example saying “volcano” when he means “tornado”?
• Does he use imprecise words, such as “things” or “stuff” rather than naming what he wants?

Clue #5: Knowledge of the Alphabet

Learning to read involves “breaking the code”—coming to understand that words are comprised of sounds that correspond to letters and that when these sounds are blended together they produce words that can be represented visually.  Learning letter sounds is critical for reading and is intricately linked to learning the names of the letters.  Fuzzy phonemes interfere with the beginning reader’s ability to learn the names and sounds of the letters in the alphabet.

Here is your developmental chart for knowledge of the alphabet: 

• Age 3: learns to sing ABC’s.  Your child can now sing this song, though the alphabet is an undifferentiated string from A to Z.  In this stage, LMNOP is often sung as one letter.
• Age 4: Your child should begin to recognize and name individual letters.
• Age 5: As your child enters kindergarten she should know the name of most upper and lower case letters.
• Age 6: By the end of kindergarten he should know all his letters and their corresponding sounds.

Now you know what to look for.  Soon we’ll talk about what to do when you see these warning signs.  Now, go listen to your kids!

Be well,

Jennifer