Dive Into Your Imagination

I have been working with Jayden for awhile now. The work has been intense and the progress has been slow. He exhibits characteristics of both auditory and phonological processing problems, as well as trouble with his short-term and phonological working memory. His struggle to be a successful reader is visible to the observer. He leans in closely to a word that he is trying to decode. He can’t track individual sounds within a word very well with his finger or with his eyes while attempting to read. His mouth works to grab onto a sound and he isn’t always aware of what he says. He makes a lot of repetitive errors. He tires easily and can become argumentative. Fortunately, he is basically a good natured child and like all children wants to be a good reader, so I can usually rally him around to putting a little more work into the lesson before we call it a day.

When we first began to work together, Jayden often confused several letter-sounds (b/d/p/q). He doesn’t do this anymore. He exhibited no decoding strategies and lacked a lot of letter-sound knowledge, including some of his vowel sounds. Now, his pronunciation of /e/ and /i/ are still very similar but he does know the difference between the sounds. In addition he can tackle a word like /leave/ by decoding through the word a sound at a time, recognizing that /ea/ can be read one of three ways. He can insert each sound in until he recognizes the word and then check it within the context of the sentences for accuracy. This is huge progress on Jayden’s part that he can do that now and with little prompting on my part.

Now that he is more comfortable with sounding through a word in order to read it, I am trying to get him to pick up speed. He tends to say a sound or 2 and then get stuck on a sound, go back to the first sound in the word and get hung up. Even when I supply the sound he may still get hung up. Once he sounds through the word correctly, I pace him through it again a little faster. I do the same thing when I am presenting a word list to him. I have Jayden decode each word on the list and read it aloud, providing any support needed to decode the words. Sometimes this will require a mini-lesson on a specific word type, i.e. compound words, words that end with an /e/, etc. I have him repeat this step until he can successfully decode each word aloud without help from me. Then we read the word list a couple of times, each time a little faster than the one before. Once he can read the word list correctly at about 1-2 seconds per word, we look for the words in the text and he reads them individually. Now he is ready to read the text. This approach is a lot of repetition and work but it is what this type of reader needs and it is definitely transferring to text much better.

Next hurdle, Jayden is constantly misreading words like /that/, /this/, /them/ and /these/. I have a few approaches for these words and other sight words that he should have already mastered. So when we talk next, we’ll see what progress has been made. I have the feeling that I am racing against the clock and worse, I get the feeling that I am the only one that knows we are in this race. Maybe I’m wrong.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed