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

Cognitive Exercises that Develop Reading, Writing and Math Abilities

Difficulties in tracking, sequencing, and visual discrimination can get in the way of the learning process for reading, writing and math. Furthermore, letter, number and word reversals can make school a chore.  However, these are core skills, and many students need to strengthen these cognitive areas before they can manage language and numbers with success.  To help students strengthen these areas and allow teachers and parents to try activities, Dr. Warren is now offering a sampling of her workbooks, Reversing Reversals Primary, Reversing Reversals and Reversing Reversals 2. Through fun, game-like activities such as coloring and mazes, students quickly master the skills necessary for improved decoding and comprehension.

To learn more about these products,  Click here 

To go to a direct download of this sampling:
Click Here

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.

How Stress Affects Literacy

One very common but often overlooked cause of reading problems that can hold a child back from achieving full literacy potential is stress. Stress often goes hand in hand with other common causes of difficulty like a bad sight-reading habit, poor short-term memory, or weak auditory processing. But sometimes, stress can stand on its own as the only thing responsible for derailing early literacy achievements. But everyone gets a little stressed now and then, right? 

How Much of a Factor Can it Really be?

To understand how that is, we must first look at the neurological processes that the brain undergoes during both the reading task and stress response. Reading is a complex task for the brain to perform, involving every lobe of the cerebrum. Your brain has to activate its visual processing, auditory processing, motor processing and a whole lot in between! It’s no simple task and because of that, it qualifies as a higher brain function.   

Stress Responses are Instinctual: 

Stress, on the other hand, is a very instinctual, automated brain function.  Stress triggers chemical reactions in the body that are designed to protect us from danger. For example, our brain elevates the hormonal levels of adrenaline and cortisol to give us the burst of energy we need to escape a tricky situation. Our higher brain function decision-making area deactivates and the very basic brain stem takes over in order to decide whether to fight, run, or freeze. The analytical function of the cerebrum is reduced by 60% or more. All non-essential body functioning shuts down to conserve energy - this definitely includes reading!

Stress and Reading are Incompatible:

You can see that the two processes are essentially incompatible. When the stress response is misapplied to non-life-threatening situations, like reading, higher brain functioning still shuts down and the reading process becomes virtually impossible.  And yet learning to read can be one of the most stressful activities of a child's life. It is very demanding and often involves a lot of "public" failure. A failure can feel public when a child is sitting on the sofa with a parent and getting stuck on the word, was, yet again. The symptoms of a stress pattern like this are fairly obvious: strong negative emotions to reading, coupled with an apparent ability to read satisfactorily at moments which can downgrade into a spiral of stress when making reading mistakes.

How Can We Disable the Stress Response to Reading?

In order to disable this stress response to reading, a structured learning environment that uses “scaffolding” techniques must be created.  It is essential to present the child with small, achievable tasks.  You can do that by reducing the task into small parts or giving far more assistance than is normal in a conventional setting.  For instance, you might:

1. show a child a word and ask him to select which one it is from three options that you provide. 
2. decode the word and ask the child to blend it. 
3. agree to read every word longer than 5 letters, if the child does the rest.

Encouragement should be liberally given as the child slowly advances through attained goals. Once a good level of self-confidence has been reached, the stress response is disabled and good learning progression can start up again.

By, David Morgan

David Morgan is Managing Director of Oxford Learning Solutions and creator of the Easyread System. Easyread is a computer-based program that helps children with dyslexia, auditory processing disorder and highly visual learning styles improve their reading and spelling through Guided Phonetic Reading techniques.

David Morgan is also the founder of the not-for-profit site: www.HelpingEveryChildtoRead.com