Short-term Memory Deficit

Well, I don’t believe in memorizing sight words; I find it counterproductive and it leads to exactly the pattern you’re describing, inaccuracy, loss of comprehension, and plateauing out.

I work with teaching not just basic phonics but advanced phonics, stressing left-to-right tracking and decoding *everything* (even if the vowels are irregular, the consonants are always a good clue).
This may *seem* slow at first, but the speed picks up steadily, the opposite of the plateau effect you are seeing with memorization.
Working on tracking and handwriting also reduces the reversals to near zero over time.

I have written several posts about exactly these same questions so to avoid repeating myself I offer to send copies to anyone who wants them. A bit backed up but another batch should come out this week.
If interested, just email a request to [email protected]

Lynn,

You have come to a great place to seek help! Bottom line, this child has decoding problems and you simply can’t work on fluency when she needs to be taught the alphabetic code first.

Believe me, none of us was taught how to teach reading in college. Thankfully I learned from reading and private training before my career was over. You can do this child and all others you ever teach a tremendous favor by reading the items I am about to recommend in addition to the information Victoria has offered you.

Right here on LD online under LD In Depth is a whole section on reading. You will gain a lot of information just reading all those articles. However, they might make more sense to you if you read this book first:

[u]Straight Talk About Reading [/u]by Susan Hall and Louisa Moats

Another important booklet with a great overview can be found online, by the National Reading Panel:

“Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read” (click on the link to this article)

http://www.nationalreadingpanel.org/Publications/researchread.htm

Following that, I’d recommend that you read:

[u]Overcoming Dyslexia [/u]by Sally Shaywitz

There are a few other very good ones, but everyone who teaches children with reading problems should immerse themselves in these books and articles before teaching another child. We can actually do damage by not understanding how we should remediate a reading disorder.

While I no longer use the actual reading program in this book (because there are better things available now), I also recommend that you read [u]Reading Reflex [/u]by Carmen and Geoffrey McGuinness in order to understand more about teaching decoding without tons of rules.

I use AbeCeDarian to teach decoding and RALP books for practicing reading code in text (automaticity and fluency).

http://www.abcdrp.com/

http://www.usu.edu/teach/LittleBooks.htm

Janis

Hi Janis,

I saw your reply about little books at http://www.usu.edu/teach/read.htm.
My son at 3rd grade can not comprehensed, probably at grade 1 level.
He can decode at 3rd grade level, but not comprehension, I am trying to see what can help him, he likes to read books, so he always pick Arthur, Bernstein Bear picture books and does not want to try chapter books.
However, with picture books that the book is very interesting to him, sometimes, he still did not comprehense well, he will pickup some detail piece here and there where interests him, but not necessary important to the story, hence, he quite often fails on reading count computer program, which requires to understand sequence, main idea, inference, opinion, etc…

Do you think these little books series can help ? does it have picture on each page makes the story interests ?

Thanks,
Shelley

Shelley — several points from your post:

When you say he can decode at a third grade level, is he efficient and fairly automatic or terribly laboured? That is to say, if you give him a story on Grade 2-3 level and just ask him to read it out loud, can he pronounce the words fairly smoothly (slow is OK and a hesitation or two is OK, he is still learning), or does he stop dead or keep going back or skip and substitute words several times in each sentence? If it is still far too much work for him, he needs more direct teaching in advanced phonics and more massed practice at lower levels.

In general, picture books are self-defeating. What he is learning is to “read” the picture, not to comprehend the words. He is unlikely to progress and may even go backwards, becoming more dependent on non-written clues.

The best way I know of to learn comprehension is to read something interesting (as interesting as possible given the child’s reading level) and then talk about it in a natural way.
For a student who can read fairly smoothly but doesn’t comprehend (a very rare beast, on the level of white rhinos although not quite a unicorn) you can get simple children’s science books and fact books as well as story books, and work on practice as suggested below.
The vast majority of kids with weak comprehension also have weak basic skills — limited decoding and low vocabulary. For these students, I suggest getting old basal readers. What you need is something with large blocks of connected text and limited numbers of pictures. It should have a developmental vocabulary program; in Grades 1 to 3, there will be a listing of new words in the back. If you look at a good basal reader Grade 2 and up, one story has from several hundred to several thousand words of connected text, and there are twenty or more such stories in the book; if you look at a picture book, the entire flimsy booklet usually has less than a thousand running words and most often only a few hundred or less — and those words have vocabulary of any random level. To get better at a skill you need to practice it, and you need written words to practice reading. The repetition of the same base vocabulary in many different contexts is very helpful. It is often a good idea to start at a lower level than the child’s official grade level and work up step by step — you develop cmprehension from things you understand, and then you can do the more difficult things as you learn more.

Once you have something at an appropriate level that the child can read smoothly out loud, then you read it in meaningful segments, from a paragraph to a page at a time. If reading is challenging to the child, it is a good thing to take turns; he reads a paragraph or a page and then you read one, pointing at the words for him to track along and modellling stopping at punctuatoion and reading with expression. Then after each person reading a meaningful chunk, you stop and talk about it. Do you know what this word means? Can you see the root words in it? What is this sentence telling us? How does this thing work? Why do you think the character acted this way? Would you act that way? What would you do if you were in this situation?

At first this may seem time-consuming. But very soon, if you have appropriate reading, it gets to be interesting and rewarding in itself.

Hi Victoria,

You point out exactly what’s my son needs.

Even though teacher said my son’s decoding skill is at grade 3. but he is not reading smoothly as you mentioned.

And, I totally agree with you that he can not continue depend on the picture for the story.

He could not underline or point out the main idea even in the paragraph, he can not tell back main idea, important concept of the story.
His vacab. is weak as well, every time when we read together, I need to stop and ask him do you know what does this word mean and explain to him.

Where should I start ? where can I get the materials to work with him ?
You mention about basal reader, is it work book ? I can work with him on vacab, then main idea, etc… ?
Where can I get it ?

Thanks,
Shelley

A company named Barnell-Loft went out of business, but it seems that there was enough demand for their materials that someone started selling them.

One of their publications was: Getting the Main Idea. Try: http://www.sraonline.com/index.php/home/curriculumsolutions/reading/specificskillseries/82

I wonder if your son’s teacher rated his comprehension at Grade 3 as an opinion or on the basis of an objective test. Try to get the name of the reading test if one was administered. Is your son able to converse at the level of the average third grade child? Do you have an intelligence test score for your son?

I will help if I can. E-mail if you wish. [email protected]

Basal readers are the kind of reading books that used to be standard in most schools from the 1940’s to the 1980’s. They are the big thick books with titles like”Friends and Neighbors” or “Streets and Roads” or “Wings of Wonder” and so on. Several different companies put out sets of these books with varying titles. A book like this will be rated by a grade level; on the spine you will either see numbers like 2-1 or two lines and one dot, meaning Grade 2, book 1. Or sometimes it will say Level three, Level four, etc (not necessarily grade levels; I have one series with ten levels from Grades 1 to 3) In the back of the book for the first three grades at least there will be a list of new vocabulary words presented.

You can get old readers at used book stores, out of school book closets (a wonderful resource if your principal will let you at the old materials!), and sometimes on the zshops and auctions at amazon.com
(Check the books out first and make sure the attitudes presented agree with your values — some of the older books can occasionally be offensive.)

If you are really, really lucky, especially if you can get into the book closet, you may be able to get the workbooks that go with the readers — and if you do, these workbooks are worth their weight in gold, irreplaceable out of print, so photocopy them for use and never write in the original. Or even take a used one and white-out the answrs, as I’ve done a few times, then photocopy.
The workbooks contain *developmental* comprehension work, from simplest to more complex.
The big problem that I see with comprehension is that so many people jump in at the deep end, trying to read a long grade-level passage with extensive new vocabulary and give the main idea or make inferences. The student is swamped with new words, new concepts, long sentences, complex grammatical constructions, adult humour which may not make sense to him, ironical comments that he takes literally, too much material all at once, and all sorts of misunderstandings from all of this — and then he has to come up with a “main idea” or predict what some strange person will do next. It doesn’t work.

I take old readers that I’ve collected and the workbook photocopies, and work through the whole darn thing. We start at a level that the student finds easy — I have one student who reached Grade 5 with a Grade 1 reading level, gack!, but he is now progressing, and I have him finishing off the Grade 1/2 transition workbook and we will start the Grade 2 workbook soon. By the end of the year or at least September he will have finished at least the Grade 4 book and be working close enough to grade level to be fitting into his class. It is so much better to work fast through three or four pages that you underswtand than to cry over a page that you are lost on. We progress very fast through the basics, but we *do* them.

Since you say your son’s decoding is not good, I also regularly recommend a good phonics series. It is called “Check and Double Check Phonics” (the name says it all — a complete and well-designed series) and is sold by scholarschoice.ca (note the .ca, *not* .com) They mail quickly and very inexpensively across North America.
If you do this, the important thing to remember is to start at the beginning, work through the whole thing, and please remember that phonics deals with *sounds* so you have to *say* the words — never silent seat work.

Neither the phonics nor the readers stand alone. You need all three things: the decoding skills and the vocabulary development and the oral reading/discussion.
You can do this yourself if you work well with your child, or you can hire a tutor and make sure the tutor knows about reading skills development, not more hope and pray.

Shelley,

Lots of ideas here already, but I’ll add a couple. If I were you, I’d get the book Reading Reflex by McGuinness and give him the tests in the books. See how good his code (phonics) knowledge is. If he has good phonics knowledge and is just slow, I’d order Quick Reads Level A and B (you have to call and ask for single copy pricing). This is daily oral repeated reading which is timed to measure improvement.

http://www.pearsonlearning.com/mcp/quickreads.cfm

Obviously if his decoding is weak, you need to work in the Reading Reflex first. There is someone who used to post on this board who has written an excellent workbook to go with the advanced code part of the book.

For comprehension, and it does sound like you child may have language comprehension problems, I use Visualizing and Verbalizing by Lindamood-Bell. But there is a similar program that is scripted and does not require training called IdeaChain by MindPrime. It would be much easier to use.

http://www.mindprime.com/

I use the Wordly Wise 3000 vocabulary workbooks from EPS, too. The QuickReads does have a vocabulary and comprehension component, but you need to get the decoding solid before working on the fluency, IMO.

I will say that the Little Book readers I mentioned give lots and lots of practice with code in text. So they could possibly work, too. You can find placement tests on the site I gave.

Janis

Thanks all !!!

Now I know where to start, be patient and work from foundation.
Looks like I need Phonics, comprehension, vacab, find the right reader books/workbook to work with my son.

Yes, I will start now instead of pray and hope he can grow out of it.

Thanks & Best Regards for the wonderful supports.
Shelley