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

Here are 10 easy steps or suggestions for you to make learning easier for your student. These suggestions work whether you have learning problems such as LD, dyslexia, ADD, autism, or gifted. These ideas will help every student because they are based on sound principles of brain-based learning.

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

My children are 11 and 13.  My 11 yr old has processing problems and my 13 yr old wants to just read and not write.

Thank you,

Theresa

Today I’ll address the writing problem. Children are often fearful of writing. They think that their writing won’t be any good. This happens to most children at one time or another. It doesn’t matter whether your child is LD, dyslexic, ADHD, CAPD, or gifted. Most children do not feel very competent when given a writing assignment. The good news is, the more often they write, the better they will get. But, what do you do in the meantime to encourage and help them improve their writing? This is what I did.

I’ll never forget the day one of my kids had a friend over during the evening while his mom was at a meeting. He had just broken his arm and had a homework assignment to complete. He was at a loss on how to get his assignment done because he had broken his right arm.

His assignment was to use his spelling words in a story. I told him, no problem. Let’s see the words you need to put into the story. He slowly took out his speller and showed me the words.

Following is the step-by-step sequence of how we worked on his homework assignment.

• I listed the words on a separate sheet of paper, so we could underline them when he used them.
• We started talking about how he could put them into a story.
• We talked about where the story would take place, the time of day, who would be in the story, and what the character might be doing. That covered the who, what, where, and when that is needed when writing a story.
• As we talked about those things, I jotted them down.

He was ready to start telling me the story.

• He recited the story, putting in his spelling words, as I wrote it down for him.
• Every once in a while he’d get ahead of himself and I’d say, “Wait a minute, how did he get from here to here? You need to tell us.”
• So, he filled in the transition.
• After this session [about 20 minutes], he had his story done.

Had his hand not been in a partial cast, I would have had him copy it in order to turn it in. But since he couldn’t copy it, I recopied it for him with the transitions put into the correct places.

When his mom came to pick him up, she was amazed that he had gotten the assignment done. Up to now, whenever he had to write a story using his spelling words, he felt totally defeated, like he would never be able to hit a nail on its head. He hated this assignment and got it every week. A major battle ensued.

I explained to her how we did it. She never thought that you could have your kids write a story that way. Now, he’ll always hit the nail on the head! Her son is no longer left to his own devices. He has a strategy that works and will help him to always be successful.

How Does This Strategy Work?

This strategy of dictating stories works because kids minds are usually working faster than their hands. Using this technique to help empower your kids will give them instant success as a writer.

When kids write at the same time as they are creating the story, typically there are many holes in the story, places where words have been left out. That is because they may be writing the first few words of the first thought and then the second thought comes to them and they start writing it as the second half of the first sentence.

What they have now is a mess and they don’t know how to get out of it. They just feel deep down into their bones that they aren’t any good at writing anyway; when in reality they may be very creative writers.

Allow Your Kids To Dictate Stories To You

By allowing your kids to dictate an assignment such as writing a story, and then having them recopy it, they are seeing that they can have success. They can do it; they can SUCCEED.

It takes just a few times of doing their writing this way before kids are able to do a whole story on their own because you have shown them step-by-step how to be successful at it.

That is how to tackle one type of writing assignment. But, you know as well as I that your kids will be getting many writing assignments over the years. For more strategies, see Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills.

Hope this has been helpful!

Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET

Many of you have asked about additional activities to do with your kids or students that have auditory processing difficulties due to CAPD, ADD, dyslexia, a learning disability, a learning difficulty or autism. I’ve compiled a variety that you can choose from whether you are tutoring a student, homeschooling, or a concerned parent tutoring your own child.

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

Miriam writes:

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