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The Easy Read Reading System

Date : 22/06/2014

Author Information

Katherine

Uploaded by : Katherine
Uploaded on : 22/06/2014
Subject : Special Needs

1 The essential elements of the 8 causes of reading difficulty A Optilexia. This is when children use the shape of the word and the memory of the way the word looks as their main form of reading. They do not sound out the phonemes. They may use this method for a number of different reasons; They may have poor phonic processing They may have hearing or speech difficulties as a child They may have been taught using flash cards or the look say method They may have very strong visual memory such that remembering a sight vocabulary is easier than learning the phonic rules. They struggle very much with short and common words They also struggle to read anything unfamiliar. They often start out as a sight reader and may be successful at this until their memory is too taxed to be able to learn any new words. They tend to guess words and often do this based on the shape and length and the first letter. A very bright child or one with a very good visual memory may be able to get to age 9 - 11 before the difficulty starts to show. As a result of this we need to make sounding out of words more attractive to them and easier. B Eye movement weakness. This is when the child has difficulty scanning the text and making the saccades across the page, which are needed to track the text from left to right. They may also find it difficult to keep their place on the page and or they may just keep rubbing their eyes. They often become tired as they read and read more easily to begin with. They often have less trouble when reading individual words than complete text. They skip words and miss out punctuation, they can be easily distracted and look for reasons to take a break. Some basic eye tracking exercises can be done - the simple one is to get them to practise following the left right movement of their thumb several times a day for a short time each repeat. If they do this regularly over a period of a couple of months then the problem can improve or even go away. However in some children the difficulties are more severe and they need a behavioural optometrist.. They can also do various hand eye co-ordination exercises such as found on OT mum and in Take Time. A diet rich in omega 3 fatty acids can help or a supplement if the child is not happy about eating fish. C Contrast sensitivity The children have very good pattern sensitivity and can see pattern where there are non, such as finding patterns in the white of the page between the words. They may find that the words start to swim on the paper, or the white between the words starts to look like rivers running down the page, they may describe the text as spiralling. Coloured overlays help and so does producing work sheets on coloured paper for the child to work on. The colour is often specific to the child and it is worth experimenting to find which works best. The people for whom this works often say it is very different reading with the colour to how they read without. D Poor short term memory Weak working memory can affect your ability to read as you forget the phonemes in the word as you bend. As you automate the process you can read more easily. This can only happen with practise. With weak short term memory the child forgets the phonemes they decoded at the start of the word by the time they get to the end, this means that they have trouble blending longer words together. They will have trouble remembering al sorts of things such as items they were asked to do or fetch. They will have trouble remembering a list of numbers at the normal level for their age. They will have trouble remembering a set of phonemes to blend. Older children, who appear to be able to blend real words will have trouble blending the phonemes in nonsense words still, and perform below expected here. The English language is very difficult with a large complexity which adds to the problem they have with the language. To help these children the reading of words needs to become automated and be pu t into procedural memory. They can have their memory strengthened by playing a wide variety of memory games such as Grandma's shopping basket and Kim's game. For reading, it is more important to strengthen their aural memory however it can prove useful to aid the visual too. Simple word searches help both by encouraging them to remember the order of letters to be found in the grid. Card memory games such as pelmanism using the cards of the easyread character pictures can help both as the child names the characters they turn over. There are a number of list games you can play where the items in the list are built up in number by the palyers in turn. These games are sometimes used by Guiding and Scouting groups to help the member learn the names or during circle time. Memory strategies such as the visual walk and the position in the house method or even the number rhyme method can help develop the memory to help them with other aspects of their life. E Fluency block This is the one I have nto come across before and was quite surprizing. The child appears to decode and blend ok, but they continue to decode and blend without ever progressing on the next stage where it feels automatic and less effortful for them. They read in a stilted manner and without fluency. They can be helped using scrambled words exercises and repeat reading shot segments of text until they can do it fluently. May need to start with very short segments at the beginning. F Attention deficit The child will be fidgety and find they cannot focus for very long. They struggle to learn to read as they cannot focus for long enough to do it. The games and work need to be engaging and interesting to them. The material has to be of interest. The main symptoms are being fidgety and having an excess of energy, being impulsive, talking a lot and in bursts, distractibility - spotting things to distract them all the time. They may have difficulty playing quietly. The difficulty should respond the ADD medication. These symptoms overlap with other conditions and may be found in many dyspraxics. ADHD kids I know tend not to have regulation of their behaviour and they find sleep difficult to acheive whereas dyspraxia causes the child to be so worn out that they sleep very well if you can get them to go to bed quietly and feeling secure.

ADHD may be impulsive and disregard their own safety, dyspraxia can fail to notice and process possible dangers but appear to be more responsive to tutoring in this area and will become more aware at an earlier age.

Their attention is short and therefore the lessons should be kept short with short activities with high interest levels. They are best taught in the morning. G stress A child showing a stress response may cry when they have to read. They may go silent and they may act out, throwing things or having a tantrum. They need their confidence in their ability to succeed to be improved so the lessons should be made achievable for them and be simple without being insulting. The reason for the stress may be another underlying difficulty which needs to be assessed for and addressed so all other patterns need to be looked into. The lessons need to be kept a stress free as possible and the child should be given plenty of praise, even for approaching the text. If there are very severe symptoms it may be necessary to read to the child while allowing them to talk about the pictures to begin with to allow them to re-connect with books as enjoyable. H Auditiory Processing Weakness This is assessed for by phonological processing tests such as CTOPP. There is no deafness, although it can be caused by poor hearing during the development of the LAD, i.e. during the ages 0- 5 years old. The child may have inherited the difficulty. They confuse the sounds in the English language and find them difficult to tell apart if they are close to each other. It is like listening down a poor phone line where you can't see the person's mouth shape. They will be weaker at receiving information in the auditory manner if they cannot see your mouth. They tend to be stronger visually and so will try to sight read the word on the page. They need a multi -sensory, systematic structured series of lessons. They need to go back over all the phonemes as it will not be known which ones they may have missed out on during the periods of glue ear or other causes for the difficulty. The guided phonetic reading will work with them as it engages them visually while drilling in the phonemes.

2 What are the essential elements of the Guided Phonetic Reading approach that Easyread uses and how is it different to the conventional approaches of Phonics and Real Books?

Guided phonic reading uses colourful cartoon characters which interact with the letter shapes to provide a cue to the sound of the letter or letter group in the word. The child can then use them to blend together to sound out the word. This makes using the phonemes more easy and inviting for them, thus they are more likely to use the sounds to read. As they practice this they form new neural pathways in the brain and hopefully in the letter box and Wernickes areas to aid their decoding and understanding of the text. As these new pathways are formed the whole decoding process becomes easier. The more they decode the more easy they find it and the more they will attempt to do it.

Decoding is essential to future reading success as new words are encountered in new subject areas as their knowledge in other subjects grows. The more they practice the stronger the new pathways become , such that the child can then have the picture cues taken away and can still manage to read, albeit with a bit of a wobble at first.

Other phonic systems try to teach the child a bunch of rules. These rules can be complex and are taught explicitly. That means the child needs to remember the rules, which are often taught using verbal prompts. As the children who are struggling to read may have weak auditory memory, remember what the teacher has told them and linking it to the picture can be difficult and may be nearly impossible. Real books is sometimes called psycholinguistic guessing game as an insult, however the advocates of real books often refer to teaching of phonic as teaching children to bark at print. The accusation of barking at print is only valid, if you are getting children to read outside their ability to understand the words or concepts they are reading. Real books involves presenting whole books to the child and asking htem to read them by using contextual and picture cues. This does often result in guessing however this method often actively encourages guessing using first letter of the word and context and rewards it. Some real book methods such as Reading recovery and Pause, prompt praise have been adapted to involve phonic more recently however the guidelines for applying these methods still advocate the use of context based clues and use of first letter guessing and the picture.

Of course this doesn't work. As the child guesses the word incorrectly this starts to alter the meaning of the sentence and so the next word they can't read is guessed even more incorrectly and then they start to read even basic words or words they know well wrong, as they start to doubt they can be correct due to the need to make them fit in with the new meaning.

This resource was uploaded by: Katherine

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