How do we help the “striving” reader? Those who struggle to read are not fully analyzing words. They often guess them. They grab at the first letter sound. Instead of using phonics, poor readers have often just tried to memorize the shape of the word or have used the illustrations in a story to guess. Poor readers needs explicit PHONICS instruction, planned decodable text reading practice and practice with dictation.
Here are some activities and strategies to help striving readers:
Assess them using DIELBS or the CORE Reading Assessment. Using what you find, reteach the letters they don’t know. Give them lots of extra practice hearing, writing and saying the letter sounds. Use tactile letters to review like making letters with: masking tape, colored paper bits, glue and cloth pieces or dried foods like pasta, rice and beans.
Assess using the RAN (Rapid Automatized Naming Test) to find out if your student has trouble rapidly naming colors, numbers, letters and objects. Difficulty on this test can point toward one form of dyslexia. Practicing recall of items with flashcards or with word retrieval games like Pictionary or Scattergories, as well as, practicing eye-tracking when reading, can be helpful.
For letter orientation issues, create a visual to help them remember such as “b” is made of a bat and a ball, a line and a circle. Repeat over and over as they write “b”. The letter “d” is made of a dog and his tail, a circle body and a line. Repeat.
Use Elkonin Boxes to teach counting sounds, naming letter sounds and then blending them.
Show them that words follow patterns. Have them sort words that follow similar patterns like: cat, bat, mat etc. from words that follow a different pattern.
Practice rhyming with them till the grasp the concept of the ending sounds sounding the same.
Cut an index card so that there is a wide window inside. Have them use the index card to help them focus on just one or two words at a time as they read.
For older students who struggle, use sets of themed books that have texts with repetitive high use words. The textproject has free text sets available. Encourage silent reading of these texts.
Some excellent links to reading strategies for striving readers:
Linda Ferrell’s Word Attack Skills
Teaching how to read multi-syllable word
Linda Ferrell’s Reading Fluency
Teaching how to read with accuracy as well as an appropriate speed.
Linda Ferrell’s Reading Fluency
Teaching how to read words with silent e correctly.
Linda Ferrell’s Reading Words with Short Vowels
Teaching a hands-on approach to “seeing” and hearing the short vowel sounds.
MORE COMING SOON