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The Reason Bright Kids Often Struggle To Read and How To Help

07.11.2007 · Posted in K-12 Education Articles

It is unfortunate that some children develop serious reading problems quite unnecessarily. The cause can be the design of the early reading books that they use. As a parent or teacher, it is important to know the pattern of symptoms you will see when this is happening.

However, this problem has proved easy to fix.

How To Spot The Problem

The children we help have often seemed to do well in the early stages of reading. The alphabet is not a big problem for them and the child has often learnt a few words quite easily.

As the child starts reading simple books, a habit of guessing develops. Usually the guess will make sense, but will be nothing like the actual word on the page.

The guessing and difficulty just seem to increase as the child moves up to more complicated books.

Eventually the child’s confidence can collapse and you will see massive resistance to any further reading.

If this situation locks in, the child’s entire educational career (and future adult life) is threatened. But we find it is usually simple to fix in quite a short time.

The Cause

As a child approaches a task like reading, it is natural to use what seems the easiest approach. For a very visual child, memorizing words by sight will seem the easiest thing to do.

Any child will almost certainly be being taught phonics in the classroom. But, in a whole class setting, it is easy to be quietly baffled, without the teacher really knowing or having the time to work through it one-on-one in any case.

Most early reading systems start with books using a very limited vocabulary, which is repeated heavily through each book. This actually encourages the memorization technique that the visual child has developed.

But, in reality, the child is not reading at all, but using a shortcut. And is traveling down a blind alley with no exit.

The child needs guidance out of this situation and onto the right path.

How To Fix It

The first thing is to give the child a method by which to remember all the different phonemes. For instance, in the Easyread Coaching System we do that by using bright and active visual images which are very easy for the child to remember. They become the hooks by which the child can remember all the different sounds. This is a classic memory enhancement technique first developed by the Ancient Greeks.

Next, you must find a way to draw the child away from the memorization and guessing approach to reading. In Easyread we do this with games designed to do that.

Once the child is redirected onto the right path, you need to make it easy to travel. Confidence is further built by steady reading practise. In Easyread we allow the child to read text unaided each day, by floating the images connected to each phoneme over the text. In that way, the child always has support when puzzling over a word.

With these changes in place, we see children who have been struggling for years ***** the reading puzzle in a matter of weeks.

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