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Patter,
The core program I would suggest you use is the Making Spelling Sense, Five Minutes to Better Reading Skills, and Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills. With those you will be working on not only her reading, spelling, and writing skills, but also the underlying causes of the problems (the visual and auditory processing problems.) You will need to add content material: a reader and social studies/history book, math book, and English book.

Each day you start off with addressing the underlying cause of the learning disabilities – the visual and auditory processing skills. Using the Making Spelling Sense and Five Minutes to Better Reading Skills does this. Then you would have her read a selection from a reader. There are many high interest low vocabulary readers available. (Making Spelling Sense addresses the auditory processing problems. Five Minutes to Better Reading Skills addresses the visual processing problems.)

After reading from the reader, you pull out the Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills and your daughter takes notes from what she has read. Then I would do an English page.

Then I would play The Comprehension Zone and/or The Sentence Zone. They work on reading comprehension and English grammar.

For math I would use the Math Zone for calculation practice and the BT Easy Math Reference Guide as the core information regarding math (how to add, subtract, multiply, & divide, calculating with fractions, decimals, and percents, and how to do word problems). You will need to get additional math workbook/s for actual problems for her for fractions, decimals, percents, and algebra. There are some great ones out there that would be great for her to use.

After math I would have her do history and science, using the forms from Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills to help her get more out of the books.

Remember, the books and games I’ve mentioned are multi-level and can be used year after year, even with a 9th grader. Each activity takes just a few minutes so they are perfect to use with ADHD students. I created all of them from my work with learning disabilities – those with visual and auditory processing problems.

Hope this is helpful.

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

FAPE stands for Free and Appropriate Public Education. It is what every child is entitled to under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.  This is how students qualify for Section 504 Plans and  for IEP plans due to learning disabilities, dyslexia, CAPD, ADHD, or other special education services.

The following is from the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, Washington, D.C. 20202:

For elementary and secondary education programs, a qualified person with a disability is a person with a disability who is:

• of an age during which it is mandatory under state law to provide such services to persons with disabilities;�
• of an age during which persons without disabilities are provided such services; or�
• a person for whom a state is required to provide a free appropriate public education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

In general, all school-age children who are individuals with disabilities as defined by Section 504 and IDEA are entitled to FAPE.

How Is an Appropriate Education Defined?

An appropriate education may comprise education in regular classes, education in regular classes with the use of related aids and services, or special education and related services in separate classrooms for all or portions of the school day. Special education may include specially designed instruction in classrooms, at home, or in private or public institutions, and may be accompanied by related services such as speech therapy, occupational and physical therapy, psychological counseling, and medical diagnostic services necessary to the child’s education.

An appropriate education will include:

• education services designed to meet the individual education needs of students with disabilities as adequately as the needs of nondisabled students are met;�
• the education of each student with a disability with non-disabled students, to the maximum extent appropriate to the needs of the student with a disability;�
• evaluation and placement procedures established to guard against mis-classification or inappropriate placement of students, and a periodic reevaluation of students who have been provided special education or related services; and�
• establishment of due process procedures that enable parents and guardians to receive required notices, review their child’s records, and challenge identification, evaluation and placement decisions, and that provide for an impartial hearing with the opportunity for participation by parents and representation by counsel, and a review procedure.

I hope this is helpful.

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

Yes, the school can test your child, but the tests used by the schools don’t always give you the whole picture. For example, sometimes a child is shown to have poor auditory memory because they were not able to repeat nonsense syllables or random digits. These activities have absolutely no meaning to your child. You know that your child can often tell you a long story about something that happened the day or week before.

Using an informal assessment in the comfort of your home that utilizes parent observation can give you the opportunity to do an assessment from your own observations of your child. Remember, you are the one that knows your child best. Then, when you have the results of your evaluation, you have a starting place to approach the school if formal testing is indicated. You can even suggest areas that need to be tested more thoroughly than might otherwise be tested, so the school can get an accurate picture of your child. (The LD Dyslexia Screening Tool gives lists of suggested formal tests that can be requested if indicated upon scoring the informal test.)

This question just came in from Penny Ray:

Hi Bonnie!

I have a question about “Five Minutes to Better Reading”. Have you used that program with a non-speaking student? What do you recommend for non-speaking (non-verbal autistic) kids in terms of boosting reading skills?

Am looking for anything that would help.

Thanks,

Penny Ray

Hi Penny,

There is a way to use the Five Minutes to Better Reading Skills with a non-speaking student, providing they can read the 3 letter words it starts with.

1. Get one more clear plastic sheet and one more dry erase marker.

2. Your student places a clear plastic sheet on top of his copy of the drill & you place a clear plastic sheet on top of yours.

3. Sit across from each other.

4. You will need to prop your book somewhat upright so he/she can’t see when you make a mark on your sheet.

5. You will then read the drill to the student, practicing it – put in a few mistakes – mark when you make a mistake.

6. The student needs to mark on his/her plastic when you make a mistake too.

7. Compare sheets – did the student mark the same mistakes as you did – ‘catching’ your mistakes?

8. Then do the timed read for one minute. Try to read the drill a little bit faster, BUT, be sure to put in mistakes again. Mistakes can be skipping a word, repeating a word,

skipping a line, or mispronouncing a word.

9. The student needs to catch whatever mistake you make.

10. If the student catches all of your mistakes, he/she is reading at 100%. You will need to figure out the percentage of errors he/she catches in order to keep track of the scoring for the student (words per minute & errors per minute that he/she caught vs words per minute & errors that were actually made).

Other non-speaking reading activities would include:

1. Pointing to the word I say, or the sentence I am reading and then a particular word or phrase with the sentence.

2. Circling all of a particular word on a page.

3. Reading a story without pictures and then drawing pictures to go with it – so there are no picture clues ahead of time. that way you know if they really read the story and understood/comprehended it.

4. Use magnetic letters for them to write the word you are saying.

5. Use word cards and have them arrange them into sentences (The Sentence Zone game would allow them to do this – it comes with over 700 color-coded word cards.)

Hope this is helpful.

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

The conduct of successful business merely consists in doing things in a very simple way, doing them regularly, and never neglecting to do them.

Quoted by: William Lever of Lever Brothers

Think about this. Isn’t this also true of reading, whether you struggle with reading or not? If I change the word business to reading we have:

The conduct of successful reading merely consists in doing things in a very simple way, doing them regularly, and never neglecting to do them.

There are simple things you can do every day or 3 days a week, never neglecting them, to empower your students to become successful readers.

Remember, there are 3 roadblocks to reading:

1. Phonetic problems

2. Reading fluency/visual tracking problems

3. Lack of language or vocabulary

Successful reading needs activities that are simple, done regularly, and never neglected.

I suggest doing them at least 3 times a week. The activities need to incorporate phonics, fluency, and language/vocabulary training. The Reading Pack

addresses all 3 of these with simple activities that don’t take a lot of time. The Sentence Zone game also builds vocabulary.

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

Board Certified Educational Therapist

1. Teach with associations e.g. Instead of underlining nouns once and verbs twice; underline nouns with a blue colored pencil and verbs with a red colored pencil. Or use smells to associate items e.g. presenting 6 new vocabulary words, use 6 smells, one for each word – lemon, orange, vanilla, cinnamon etc.
2. Use concrete rewards.
3. Teach study skills, with lots of practice.
4. Give some tests orally.
5. Test for knowledge, not attention span by shortening the length of tests, or giving one part at a time.
6. Restructure your timed test e.g. Math timed tests; rather than needing to complete the whole page in 2 or 3 minutes, have the students chart their progress, so they are just competing against themselves and seeing their own progress. They could each have their own goal set up for passing. For instance, if one student got 10 problems correct in the 2 minutes, their goal might be 20 or 25 in two minutes. Another student may have completed 30 problems correctly in 2 minutes his goal might be 45 or 50 problems correct in 2 minutes. This will not only reduce the stress, but also increase the performance. Gradually, when moving from one type of timed test to another, you can gradually raise the goal for each student. Ultimately what we want is for students to know the math facts and be able to use them. Working with the math facts at a fast pace is a bonus.
7. Allow extra credit for projects.
8. Encourage questions from students so that they are not afraid to ask for clarification on assignments.
9. Use discipline for teaching, not punishment.
10. Stay calm, some students just try to get a rise out of the teacher.

There are learning games that help teach grammar and comprehension while having fun that are also helpful for LD, dyslexia, ADD, autism, or gifted students.

Hope this has been helpful.

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

From the Cherokee Sentinel Jan 14, 2009

Homework Help for Children With Learning Disabilities

Each student learns differently from the next. Some may not grasp concepts as easily as their classmates, or they may have different interpretations of material. This does not mean that they do not have the intelligence to succeed in school. Typically those classified as having a learning disability have an average or above intelligence but experience difficulty in processing information. Sometimes, however, learning disabilities go undetected and students suffer.

Learning disabilities are something for which parents, teachers and students must develop strategies. With plans of action, learning disabled (LD) students can go on to engage in successful school careers — including college or other secondary educations. However, without some special help, the results may be less optimistic. Consider the following statistics.

The National Institutes of Health say that 75 to 80 percent of special education students identified as LD have their basic deficits in language and reading. Thirty-five percent of students identified with learning disabilities drop out of high school. This is twice the rate of their non-disabled peers. A National Longitudinal Transition Study indicated that 62 percent of learning disabled students are typically unemployed one year after graduation.

Working with LD students should begin early in a school career as a collaborative effort between teachers and caregivers. One area in which parents can do much good is with homework help. The National Association of Special Education Teachers (NASET) offers these guidelines for working with LD students on homework.

• Set up a homework schedule: Some children may need a little guidance deciding on when is the best time to engage in homework. If the task seems too overwhelming, it may simply be pushed aside. Keep to the schedule as closely as possible.

• Rank order assignments: Help children decide what assignments should be tackled first. Subjects for which there is more difficulty may be scheduled first because they will take the longest to get through.

• Leave children alone to complete their homework: Sitting next to your child may create learned helplessness because the same “assistance” is not imitated in the classroom. Parents serve their children better by acting as a resource person to whom the child may come with a problem.

• Check correct problems first: When your child brings you a paper to check, mention to him/her how well he/she did on the correct problems, spelling words, etc. For the ones that are incorrect say, “I bet if you go back and check these over you may get a different answer.”

• Don’t let homework linger all night: When an acceptable amount of time has passed, and if homework assignments aren’t complete, simply write a letter to your child’s teacher of the circumstances. Letting homework drag on will only reinforce a LD child’s feelings of inadequacy.

• Discuss homework problems before your child reads a chapter or a part of coursework: This way he or she knows what to expect and look for.

• Check problems in small batches: A LD child may benefit from immediate gratification, which can be achieved by checking homework in short intervals. Additionally, if the child is doing the assignment incorrectly, the error can be detected and explained, preventing your child from doing the entire assignment incorrectly.

* Consider placing textbook chapters on tape: Research indicates that the more sensory input children receive, the greater the chance the information will be retained. For instance, parents can place science or social studies chapters on tape so that the child can listen while reading along.

NASET also says that parents should always be aware of symptoms indicating the possibility of more serious learning problems, which may turn up when students tackle homework. Such symptoms may include constant avoidance of homework, forgetting to bring home assignments, taking hours to do homework, procrastination of class work, low frustration tolerance, labored writing, poor spelling, etc. Consult with the teacher or a psychologist to come up with new strategies.

I hope you found this helpful. For more information on the underlying cause of learning problems, download the e-book Understanding LD and Dyslexia as my gift to you.

Bonnie Terry, M. ED., BCET

Auditory processing is a critical component to reading success. We work on a variety of auditory processing areas every time we do activities from the Reading Pack: Five Minutes to Better Reading Skills, Making Spelling Sense, Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills, and The Comprehension Zone. For example, The Comprehension Zone is a game where we play for both auditory memory, auditory comprehension, and reading comprehension.  Making Spelling Sense is where we work on auditory discrimination, auditory closure, and auditory memory.

Computer work adds to the hands on work we have already done. I don’t use computerized programs exclusively because I strongly believe that students need the one-on-one feedback and modeling from peers, siblings, parents, and teachers. The increase in self-esteem that a student gets from this interaction with you while working on their skills is priceless.

Computer programs enhance the progress. There are a variety of good programs out there. Earobics and Fast Forward are the two that I’m most familiar with. They are both sound programs and do help with auditory processing difficulties. But, again, I would NOT use computer programs exclusively because students gain so many more benefits from one-on-one and small group work. Student reap a triple impact when you work directly with them: in addition to their skills improving, their auditory processing improving, their self-esteem also improves dramatically.

Here are some other activities you can do with things you typically have around the house or in the classroom to strengthen auditory processing.

These activities are from Children With Learning Disabilities by Janet Lerner

These activities can be done at home whether you are homeschooling or helping your child after school. These activities help those children with dyslexia, learning disabilities, ADHD, auditory processing problems such as auditory memory. Teaching strategies are just that, teaching strategies. A strategy can be done by a parent that is interested in helping thier child improve their auditory processing skills.

Auditory Sensitivity to Sounds

1. Listening for sounds. Have the children close their eyes and become auditorily sensitive to environmental sounds about them. Sounds like cars, airplanes, animals, outside sounds, sounds in the next room etc., can be attended to and identified.
2. Recorded sounds. Sounds can be placed on tape or records and the child is asked to identify them. Planes, trains, animals, and typewriters are some of the sounds that may be recorded.
3. Teacher-made sounds. Have the children close their eyes and identify sounds the teacher makes. Examples of such sounds include dropping a pencil, tearing a piece of paper, using a stapler, bouncing a ball, sharpening a pencil, tapping on a glass, opening a window, snapping the lights, leafing through pages in a book, cutting with scissors, opening a drawer, jingling money, or writing on a blackboard.
4. Food sounds. Ask the child to listen for the kind of food that is being eaten, cut, or sliced: celery, apples, carrots.
5. Shaking sounds. Place small hard items such as stones, beans, chalk, salt, sand, or rice into small containers or jars with covers. Have the child identify the contents through shaking and listening.

Auditory Attending

1. Attending for sound patterns. Have the child close his eyes or sit facing away from the teacher. Clap hands, play a drum, bounce a ball, etc. Have the child tell how many counts there were or ask him to repeat the patterns made. Rhythmic patterns can be made for the child to repeat. For example: slow, fast, fast.
2. Sound patterns on two objects provides a variation on the above suggestion; for example, use a cup and a book to tap out sounds patterns.

Discrimination of Sounds

1. Near or far. With eyes closed, the child is to judge what part of the room a sound is coming from, and whether it is near or far.
2. Loud or soft. Help the child learn to judge and discriminate between loud and soft sounds.
3. High and low. The child learns to judge and discriminate between high and low sounds.
4. Find the sound. One child hides a music box or ticking clock and the other children try to find it by locating the sound.
5. Follow the sound. The teacher or a child blows a whistle while walking around the room. The child should try to follow the route taken through listening.
6. Blindman’s bluff. One child in the group says something like an animal sound, sentence, questions, or phrase. The blindfolded child tries to guess who it is.
7. Auditory figure-background. To help a child attend to a foreground sound against simultaneous irrelevant environment noises, have him listen for pertinent auditory stimuli against a background of music.

Awareness of Phonemes or Letter Sounds

For success at the beginning stages of reading the child must perceive the individual phoneme sounds of the language, and he must learn to discriminate each language sound that represents a letter shape from other sounds. Such abilities are essential for decoding written language.

1. Initial consonants. Have the child tell which word begins like milk. Say three words like “astronaut, mountain, bicycle.”
2. Ask the child to think of words that begin like Tom.
3. Find pictures of words that begin like Tom, or find pictures of words in magazines that begin with the letter T. Find the word that is different at the beginning: “paper, pear, table, past.”
4. Consonant blends, digraphs, endings, vowels. Similar activities can be devised to help the child learn to auditorily perceive and discriminate other phonic elements.
5. Rhyming words. Learning to hear rhyming words helps the child recognize phonograms. Games similar to those for initial consonants can be used with rhyming words. Experience with nursery rhymes and poems that contain rhymes is useful.
6. Riddle rhymes. Make up riddles that rhyme. Have the child guess the last rhyming word. For example: “It rhymes with book. You hang your clothes on a _________.”

I hope you found this helpful.

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

www.bonnieterrylearning.com

Feel free to leave a comment by clicking on comments at the top right of this post, or email me at newsletter@bonnieterrylearning.com

]]> http://www.bonnieterry.com/blog/index.php/2009/01/18-auditory-processing-activities-you-can-do-without-spending-a-dime/feed/ 4 http://www.bonnieterry.com/blog/index.php/2009/01/my-son-was-just-diagnosed-with-capd-how-can-i-help-him/ http://www.bonnieterry.com/blog/index.php/2009/01/my-son-was-just-diagnosed-with-capd-how-can-i-help-him/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:57:18 +0000 bonnieterry http://www.bonnieterry.com/blog/?p=86 Bonnie,

Hi Maricela,

When your son or daughter is diagnosed with CAPD, ADD, ADHD, dyslexia or any other learning disability, many emotions run through you. On the one hand you are relieved that there is an actual name for the learning problems your child is experiencing. On the other hand, you want to know everything you can as quickly as you can about the problem so you can help your child as quickly as possible to overcome it.

I believe the real key to living with any learning disability, whether is dyslexia, a visual processing problem, CAPD, or any other auditory processing problem, is to understand what it is and how it impacts learning and then, what can you do about it.

With that in mind, CAPD is a physical disorder under the protection of the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). The majority of kids with CAPD do have normal hearing. However, their ability to process auditory information is compromised. The difficulties they exhibit can range from mild to severe and can take a variety of forms.

Here are a variety of symptoms of CAPD:

Your child:

• Is easily distracted or bothered by loud or sudden noises
• Is upset by noisy environment
• Improves their behavior and performance in quieter settings
• Has difficulties following directions
• Has reading, spelling, writing, or other speech-language difficulties
• Has difficulty comprehending abstract information
• Is forgetful and disorganized
• Has a hard time following conversations

This is just a short list of possible symptoms. Many of these symptoms are also found in learning disabilities, and attention deficit disorder (ADD or ADHD). It is even possible to have both CAPD and a learning disability or ADD or a specific language impairment. Your child must be assessed individually by an audiologist to determine if they have CAPD.

There are five main problems that come into play with CAPD:

1. Auditory Figure-Ground Problems can lead to problems with instructions that are only auditory because students may not be able to separate the instruction from background conversations.
2. Auditory Memory Problems can lead to difficulties retaining or recalling auditory experiences or directions. Some students find it hard to recognize auditory stimuli they have heard before; others remember hearing the stimuli, but cannot reproduce it accurately. When given a list of things to do, some children remember only the first direction, some only the last. Auditory memory problems can also lead to low factual knowledge.
3. Auditory Discrimination Problems can lead to difficulties acquiring, understanding, and using spoken language. Discrimination problems can also lead to poor spelling.
4. Auditory Visual Coordination Problems can lead to the inability to watch and listen, or listen and copy at the same time. It is very difficult to complete a task. This leads to problems in taking notes and following along with oral reading. Other areas that can be involved are listening and visually doing something at the same time.
5. Auditory Language Association & Classification Problems can lead to difficulties with holding two or more concepts in relationship to each other, identifying and verbalizing concepts and making inferences from conversations or understanding verbal math problems.

Definitions excerpted from Learning Difficulty/Disability Pre-Screening and Comprehensive Identification Tool

So, what do you do to help your child?

You want to look for materials that will address those specific auditory areas. At the same time though, I like to look for materials that will also give students more bang for the time they spend working on the specific areas of perception that are causing the difficulty. In other words, I want to use materials that also teach specific skills such as spelling, reading/listening comprehension, note-taking, or writing that also address the areas of auditory processing that students with CAPD have.

The Reading Pack that I developed addresses the specific skills students need to improve:

1. Reading fluency
2. Reading Comprehension
3. Spelling
4. Note-taking & Writing

The Reading Pack also addresses the following auditory processing areas:

1. Auditory Closure
2. Auditory Memory
3. Auditory Discrimination
4. Auditory Visual Coordination
5. Auditory Visual Integration
6. Auditory Language Association & Classification
7. Auditory Integration

The game The Comprehension Zone addresses reading and listening comprehension.

For additional Information on CAPD, see

http://www.iser.com/caparticle.html

http://kidshealth.org/parent/medical/ears/central_auditory.html

http://www.autistics.org/library/capd.html

I hope this is helpful to you.

To leave a comment or a question, click where the words Leave a comment are in blue – just under the title of the article on the right hand side.

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

www.bonnieterrylearning.com

This child knows how to read. The problem is bringing him up to speed. He reads 23 words per minute and according to the teacher he should be at 43 words per minute! What do I do to help?

Hi Miriam,

Schools, teachers, parents, even homeschooling parents are becoming more concerned about reading fluency and speed with good reason. Children are expected to learn more than ever before and to learn faster than ever before. In the classroom it doesn’t matter if you have a learning problem, LD, dyslexia, or ADD. Every child is expected to learn faster and to read faster.   As a parent though, it can be tough knowing what to do about it. How can you help your child improve their reading speed?

Let’s look at the underlying cause first. Typically when a child knows how to read but they are slow readers the actual problem is due to visual tracking difficulties. To tell if this is the case, listen to them read aloud. Are they skipping, omitting, or repeating words when they read OR are they mispronouncing them?

It doesn’t matter whether a child is dyslexic, has an identified learning disability, or are even gifted, some children are slow readers. And, usually when a child is a slow reader it is because they are missing bits and pieces when they are reading, so they re-read the text to make it make sense to them. This happened often in my home with one of my children. He had tested to be gifted, but took ‘forever’ to read his assignments.

The other problem could be that the child is a slow processor – if they read accurately aloud but are slow when they are reading. The solution to both of these problems – the skipping & repeating words or the slow processing of the words is the same – reading drills that are short in duration that are specifically designed to work on the visual tracking as well as speed in a short time frame. See Five Minutes To Better Reading Skills.

If the underlying cause is one of mispronunciation, there is another solution.

What Is Reading Fluency?

Reading fluency is retrieval automaticity. To be an efficient reader, you need to be able to retrieve words automatically. The studies also show that slow single word reading leads to poor comprehension and frustration. If you can’t read rapidly, you can’t hold large pieces of language – text in meaning!

When you read with fluency you do so without thinking of the reading process. This automatic reading then gives you the ability to comprehend what you have read.

Reading fluency encompasses the speed or rate of reading, as well as the ability to read materials with expression. M. S. Meyer and R. H. Felton (1999) defined fluency as “‘the ability to read connected text rapidly, smoothly, effortlessly, and automatically with little conscious attention to the mechanics of reading, such as decoding”.

Time Needed to Improve Fluency

Cecil Mercer, a researcher from the University of Florida, published his results from his study Effects of Fluency Intervention for Middle Schoolers with Specific Learning Disabilities in (2000) stating daily practice can be for as little as five or six minutes.  Substantial gains in reading fluency came from repeated oral reading of various sorts such as letters or words for five or six minutes a day. The key to the success was doing the repeated oral reading over a period of time e.g. six months to twenty-three months.

Research on Fluency

The importance of reading fluency has been noted for many years. In fact one of the first reading fluency researches, psychologist William MacKeen Cattell (1886), discovered that you could read a word (like tiger) faster than you can name a picture of a pouncing feline creature!

Cattell was the first person to recognize that we become quite ‘automatic’ when we read. In fact, we are more automatic when reading than when speaking. So, learning to read automatically is a huge achievement for our brain. This is a capacity that we have, learning something so well that we can do it almost without thinking.

According to research done by S. Jay Samuels in the 1970’s, “If you are slow in word identification, you have trouble focusing on and attending to what you are reading, and therefore your comprehension is lower than it should be.” Thirty years later (2006) he goes on to say that “The link between fluency and overall reading proficiency is now well established. Comprehension requires the fluent master of the surface-level aspects of reading.”

Peter Schreiber in the 80’s stated, “It is not just reading, but hearing the rhythm and flow of the language will help students improve reading.”

Reid Lyon, Ph.D. stated in 1997, “While the ability to read words accurately is a necessary skill in learning to read, the speed at which this is done becomes a critical factor in ensuring that children understand what they read. As one child recently remarked, ‘If you don’t ride a bike fast enough, you fall off.’ Likewise, if the reader does not recognize words quickly enough, the meaning will be lost… If the reading of the words on the page is slow and labored, the reader simply cannot remember what he or she has read, much less relate the ideas they have read about to their own background knowledge.”

In 2001, Nancy Mather and Sam Goldstein stated, “Children are successful with decoding when the process used to identify words is fast and nearly effortless or automatic.” As noted, the concept of automaticity refers to your ability to recognize words rapidly with little attention required to the word’s appearance. “The ability to read words by sight automatically is the key to skilled reading” (Ehri, L.C., 1998).

Some children have developed accurate word pronunciation skills but read slowly. For these children, decoding is not automatic or fluent, and their limited fluency may affect performance in the following ways:

They read less text than peers and have less time to remember, review, or comprehend the text.

They expend more cognitive energy than peers trying to identify individual words.

They may be less able to retain text in their memories and less likely to integrate those segments with other parts of the text (Mastropieri, Leinart, & Scruggs, 1999).

If you don’t read well, you don’t want to read. Improving fluency is a critical component to improving reading. See Five Minutes to Better Reading Skills. It contains reading drills specifically designed to improve reading fluency, phonics, visual processing speed, visual tracking, and visual closure in 5 minutes a day.

Remember, whether your child has dyslexia, a learning disability, trouble with phonics, or trouble with reading comprehension, you can help them improve their reading with fluency training. It doesn’t matter if you homeschool or if your child attends a public school, every child can benefit from fluency training.

I hope this has been helpful.

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET