Activities to Make Learning Reading Fun

These activities have been developed by national reading experts for you to use with children, ages birth to Grade 6. The activities are meant to be used in addition to reading with children every day.

Your main goal will be to develop great enthusiasm in the reader for reading and writing. It is less important for the reader to get every word exactly right. Rather, it is more important for the child to learn to love reading itself. If the reader finishes one book and asks for another, you know you are succeeding! If your reader writes even once a week and comes back for more, you know you have accomplished your beginning goals.

LearningToRead, activities, ReadingRockets

5 Simple Homework Strategies to Help Your Child

By: Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes (2011)

Just as your children have schedules and expectations each day at school, it is important to have them at home as well. This is especially important for helping to get homework done with the fewest possible frustrations for both you and your child. While establishing a routine may be time consuming in the beginning, it does become routine, and thus easier with each passing day. Homework expectations will become just one more part of their and your busy lives.

Lindamood-Bell recommends the following 5 simple, yet effective, homework strategies to help your child stay on track.

Plan study time with a schedule Look ahead to see what needs to be accomplished in the next day, week, and month. Be realistic when estimating the time it will take to complete an assignment or project.
Prioritize with a to-do list Write out a to-do list each day. The list should include homework assignments, activities, chores, and plans with friends.
Organize each day Make sure backpacks are packed with the appropriate books, binders and school supplies. Help your child pack the backpack the night before and unpack it as soon as they come home from school.
Use one binder for each subject Each subject binder should have two labeled sections: one for work to be finished and one for completed work.
Set up a positive workspace to facilitate good study habits. Make sure the space has good lighting, a clutter-free table top, and a comfortable chair. There should be little or no noise. Avoid distractions such as loud music, instant messaging, phone calls, text messages, television, and electronic games.
Encourage your child to talk with his teacher Help your child ask questions when he doesn't understand something or needs help with classwork or homework. Rehearse with your child what to say when she needs help.

Phonemic Awareness

What is the Role of Audition in Literacy?
by Donna Geffner

The single best predictor of reading success has been known to be phonological awareness. That is, children need to be aware of sounds of speech in order to acquire sound-letter correspondence knowledge and use this knowledge to decode the printed word. If a child is not aware of the sounds contained in a word, the child will have difficulty associating sounds with letters.

According to Sally Shaywitz (2003), for children with dyslexia, phonemes are less well developed. As a consequence, children when speaking may have a hard time selecting the appropriate phoneme. The phoneme is the fundamental element of the language system, the "essential building block of all spoken and written words" (p. 41). It is at the lowest level of the language hierarchy, relegated to processing the distinctive sound elements of language. The upper language hierarchy involves semantics-words, syntax-grammar, and discourse-connected speech. Dyslexia involves a weakness within the language system at the phonologic level.

Shaywitz believes that before words can be identified, understood, stored in memory, or retrieved from it, they must be broken down into phonemes. It is the phoneme that gets processed by the brain's language system. Shawitz contends that the reader needs to convert the letters of words on a page into their sounds and appreciate that words are composed of smaller segments or phonemes. Dyslexics perceive words as an "amorphous blur," without appreciating the underlying segmental nature, and fail to recognize the internal sound structure of words.

read article:
http://www.asha.org/Publications/leader/2005/050927/f050927b.htm

Elements of Reading: Vocabulary

Role of Vocabulary in Reading Instruction, by Isabel Beck

Of the many compelling reasons for providing students with instruction to build vocabulary, none is more important than the contribution of vocabulary knowledge to reading comprehension. Indeed, one of the most enduring findings in reading research is the extent to which students’ vocabulary knowledge relates to their reading comprehension. Most recently, the National Reading Panel (2000) concluded that comprehension development cannot be understood without a critical examination of the role played by vocabulary knowledge. Given that students’ success in school and beyond depends in great measure upon their ability to read with comprehension, there is an urgency to providing instruction that equips students with the skills and strategies necessary for lifelong vocabulary development.

Choosing words to teach.

Language-Based Classroom

Ideally, students should be grouped by learning needs and not by diagnoses. 

1. Small (3-7 students) classrooms where instruction and class discussion are teacher-directed, with the teacher modeling language and performing the function of questioner; the teacher continually encouraging students’ responses to elicit, elaborate and model language.  Students are active participants in the learning process with the teacher ensuring that each student is comprehending and interacting with the material, rather then passively trying to memorize it.

2. The highly structured small group interaction is essential to the language-based program.  It is necessary for the student to be placed with others of similar intellectual abilities, with similar rate of processing and linguistic skills.

3. Class instruction and information is presented in a highly structured, organized manner, using oral and visual methods to support comprehension and to emphasize important concepts and main ideas.

4. All of the previous day's lessons should be reviewed the following day with new information integrated and related to old information.  Lessons spiral back to previously learned material for review to ensure continue mastery, and to relate to new information.

5. Reading, writing, spelling, and oral language strategies should be taught and reinforced across the curriculum to facilitate continuity, generalization and internalization.  These are intensive, rule-based, highly structured, systematic, explicitly-taught specialized programs, delivered by certified, trained teachers with and experience  in these specialized programs.

6. A certified Speech and Language Pathologist should provide direct therapeutic services and provide consultation to the classroom teacher on how to present the information in a language-based manner.

Modified from report by Dr. J. Fahey, Ph.D., Neuropsychologist, Floating Hospital for Children at Tuffs New-England Medical Center, August 2006.

Catch Them Before They Fall

By Joseph K. Torgesen (1998)

One of the most compelling findings from recent reading research is that children who get off to a poor start in reading rarely catch up. As several studies have now documented, the poor first-grade reader almost invariably continues to be a poor reader (Francis, Shaywitz, Stuebing, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1996; Torgesen & Burgess, 1998).

And the consequences of a slow start in reading become monumental as they accumulate exponentially over time. As Stanovich (1986) pointed out in his well-known paper on the "Matthew effects" (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer) associated with failure to acquire early word reading skills, these consequences range from negative attitudes toward reading (Oka & Paris, 1986), to reduced opportunities for vocabulary growth (Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985), to missed opportunities for development of reading comprehension strategies (Brown, Palinscar, & Purcell, 1986), to less actual practice in reading than other children receive (Allington, 1984).

Read full article.  

What is a Language-Based Learning Difference?

Reachers believe that up to 20% of the people in the United States have a language-based learning difference. Of the students with specific learning disabilities receiving special education services, 70–80% have deficits in reading.  LLDs are caused by a difference in brain structure that is present at birth and is often hereditary. There are many kinds of learning differences, including dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia, and they can affect people in various ways. LLDs affect both genders equally as well as all ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds.

Language-based learning differences (LLDs) affect the way the brain processes information and can impact how a child learns to read, write, hear, speak, or calculate. Children have different learning styles, but some students experience a greater disconnection between their academic aptitude and their ability to read or write. An LLD is not a reflection of low intelligence, but it can negatively impact your child's self-esteem and confidence.

Signs or symptoms of a language-based learning disability:

• Difficulty expressing ideas clearly, as if the words needed are on the tip of the tongue but won't come out. Or, what the child says may be vague and difficult to understand (using unspecific vocabulary, such as "thing" or "stuff" to replace words that cannot be remembered). Filler words like "um" may be used to take up time while the child tries to remember a word.
• Difficulty learning new vocabulary that the child hears (e.g., taught in lectures/lessons) and/or sees (e.g., in books)
• Difficulty understanding questions and following directions that are heard and/or read
• Difficulty recalling numbers in sequence (e.g., telephone numbers and addresses)
• Difficulty understanding and retaining the details of a story's plot or a classroom lecture
• Difficulty reading and comprehending material 
• Difficulty learning words to songs and rhymes
• Difficulty telling left from right, making it hard to read and write since both skills require this directionality
• Difficulty learning letters and numbers
• Difficulty identifying the sounds that correspond to letters, making learning to read difficult
• Mixes up the order of letters in words while writing
• Mixing up the order of numbers that are a part of math calculations
• Difficulty spelling
• Difficulty learning memorizing the times tables
• Difficulty learning telling time

Read more at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) website.