Wondering what thoughts are about teaching from complex words to simple. Son does complex more easily than simple. Has trouble recognizing any words on sight. Beginning to sound out words-recognizes most phonemes. We’ve noticed he can sound out words like indivisible (did this to teach sounds in the word which he had trouble pronouncing for pledge of allegiance) while having trouble with shorter words like cat, bat, hat. Wondering if we use same concept posted here for learning to tie shoes would work. Are there any pitfalls for future. Idea is to find larger words with smaller syllables as part and teach large to small instead of small to large….
Re: Complex to simple
This is one thing I’ve noticed about my son too. He will stop on words like “cat” “and” “or” and “I” yet have a much easier time with compound words or a word like “friend.”
One thing we’ve started doing with our son is I purchased some basic SRA readers from an educational store. We started him on Level A (the first one) “A Pig Can Jig.” Basically, the stories in the first two books of this series are a repetition of the same simple words. For example, the first page starts out “I ran. Dan ran. The man ran.”
What we’ve done is have our son read this book every day with the idea of improving his speed and accuracy. The book is a soft cover 60 page book. As speed and accuracy increase, we go onto the next book. Because he does have difficulty with simple words (and the stories are more nonsense than story) they don’t become memorized like with other books. Also, we go back and forth between books too.
I’m no expert, so I don’t know if this is the “right way” to deal with this problem. But it does seem to be helping a little.
Re: Complex to simple
It’s exactly the kind of thing I do that works — it’s getting the kid to fluency and automaticity. Your intuitions are good :)
How about finding a book he would like to read for content and working through it? You read very very slowly at first, but it is amazing how things pick up after a few weeks.
If you do this, it is *extremely* important to supervise and make sure he continues to read every single word and track left to right, not pick and guess. But if that pitfall is avoided, it is an extremely effective method. I have used this with a number of upper-grade non-readers.
By reading connected text, you naturally get all the little words in context and normal frequency, as well as the long ones that are interesting challenges.
You can take the long words as they come and write them out in a list, then use this list for practice and review.