Reply to 6 year old might have reading issues?

Forum Index » Kids With Special Needs and Disabilities

Reply to "6 year old might have reading issues?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]OP, here are a few things I would assess if your child were my student:

1) Does she know a basic (most common) consonant sound for all the single consonants? And can she supply the sound automatically? I.e. show her a m and she immediately says /m/?  Does she automatically know qu=/kw/ ands x=/ks/?

1a) (also does she know the next most likely sounds for "c". (k,s) and g (g,j) and s (s,z)? I explicitly teach these alternate sounds immediately with my beginning readers so they have more chances to decode words earlier, but some teachers don't teach that way so if they don't know the alternate sounds, I'm not concerned... I just teach them right away!)

2.) does she know the short and long vowel sound for a,e,i,o,u and can she produce them very quickly when asked?  I.e something like "A says /short a sound/ and /long a sound/". For sure she should have all the short vowels down automatically - no mistakes - by age 6. Long vowels are just the names of the letters. To decode well students need to be able tp produce both sounds.

3) Does she know that the letter y represents three sounds - /y/ at the start of a word (yes), and /long e/ or /long i/ at the end of a word (happy, sky).

4) Does she know the sounds made by the consonant digraphs: th, sh, ch, ph, and ng? (Most teachers don't teach ph early on, and some teach ng in the context of the vowel "welded" onto it - ing, ang, ong, ung etc.  but she should know all the others - again automatically.

5) If you say three sounds to her, separated by a second, can she blend it to make a syllable?  EG with a real word (not writing - this is only orally). /p/.../i/..../g/,,, can she blend quickly and automatically to say /pig/? If she is slow to do this orally, then even if she does know all her letter sounds, she will be slow to decode words because she is not proficient yet in blending phonemes.
If she can blend to make a real word, try doing the same thing with nonsense words.  Eg.  /m/.../i/.../p/.  Sometimes kids who cant blend well will blend half the sounds, and then guess a word that makes sense. By observing her blending nonsense words, you can identify if there is a blending problem, and underwhat conditions there is a blending problem. Some kids just cannot blend an initial consonant with a medial vowel sound. But they can blend a vowel sound first, then a consonant sound. Helping students learn to blend sounds orally is a big part of reading remediation.

6. If she knows all her letter sounds, and can blend orally, then try giving her nonsense words to decode. They should be CVC like "mip, ret, lon, ting, chob" etc.  So she isn't using her knowledge of words to guess the word, she has to totally decode the whole thing.  If she knows all her letter sounds easily and automatically AND she can blend sounds orally, she SHOULD be able to decode words automatically and quickly; she just needs some practice. Some kids need to sound out words 3 times and then they can decode automatically; some need to decode the word 30 times before automaticity. Some very slow decoders may need 300 times. But, once they start decoding some words automatically, that skill then transfers to other words - they don't have to decode each and every word that many times.

There's no good way to skipp over the decoding practice part of reading. Yes, you can use real words, but there is a danger that the child will only decode part of the word and then guess the rest, and that's find for reading for meaning, but it doesn't exercise the decoding "muscle" that needs to activate for decoding to become automatic. So, decoding nonsense words is a very effective drill to help students become more fluent at decoding automatically.

As soon as she can decode CVC words proficiently and automatically, it is time to repeat the process with words with consonant clusters i.e. CCVC and CVCC.  spit, bend. or nonsense words eg... filt, slep

You can decode these words and spell them. Ideally this is what the reading interventionist is doing. If they are working on sight words, though, they probably aren't doing enough of this practice as well, because there just isn't enough time for both.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics