| HomeschoolingResourceCenter.org Home | Search | About Us | Contact Us |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Teaching Tips January 1, 2009 |
|
Evaluating a child’s reading depends on the stage the child is at in the reading process. Learning to read is a sequential skill. That means it builds letter-by-letter, word-by-word, line-by-line and sentence-by-sentence. Each subsequent skill is based on mastery of previous skills. Reading skills are categorized into four stages. There are also certain preliminary skills or underlying abilities that must be developed for a child to be able to learn to read. Sometimes these skills are referred to as pre-reading. Pre-Reading Reading is the ability to interpret the meaning of printed words. The words are a system of codes that represent various sounds. There are around 44 basic sounds in our English language that are represented by the 26 letters in our alphabet. This means reading is based on the sounds of our language – sounds that are heard and imitated. The skills involved in hearing the sounds properly and imitating them are called pre-reading skills, and these originate in the right side of the brain. Brain research shows God’s marvelous design for human development. Certain physical changes take place in the brain during infancy and toddlerhood that allow the child to hear the necessary sounds and mimic them. The brain is predisposed or “pre-wired” to hear sound patterns and rhymes (which is why so many picture books have rhymes and a cadence or rhythm to them). The ability to distinguish the different sounds is called phonemic awareness. Sometime during the early primary years, other changes take place that allow the child to distinguish the letters on a page and track words along a line of print. The letter codes can then be connected to the sounds of the language. 
Stages of Reading
No one questions the importance of learning to read and how vital it is to all learning. But the big push to get students reading earlier and earlier – often before they are ready – tends to create a dislike for reading. Students who struggle in the early years become convinced that they’re poor readers and give up. This push also affects the next level of reading. Homeschooling parents often become overly concerned when their emerging readers have trouble with structured reading programs or standardized tests that focus on comprehension. Notice that full reading comprehension does not occur until the information stage. This doesn’t mean a child can’t understand the meaning of words or the flow of a story before this stage. What it does mean is that a child should not be tested on reading comprehension until the decoding stage has been mastered and a certain amount of fluency has been reached. Just because a student is in 3rd or 4th grade does not mean he or she is automatically ready to read-to-learn. Remember all learning is a process of introducing the skill, practicing the skill, and mastering the skill. Phonics instruction - when the child is working on learning the letter codes and stringing the codes together to sound out words – teaches the baseline skills for reading. The point of the fluency stage is to give the child plenty of practice to master these basic skills. This means you don’t need to be asking a lot of questions about what was read. The child’s brain is focused on the “mechanics” of reading and making the sound/letter connections strong. Tying the word to its meaning – which is necessary for comprehension - involves making totally different connections. This doesn’t mean you ignore comprehension. Instead, work on it when YOU read aloud to the child. Children can understand many more words in oral conversation than they can use in their own conversation or can read and write. After reading a passage, ask simple questions about the story line, the main characters, where the story took place, and the sequence of events. This way you are introducing comprehension skills separately from decoding and fluency skills. You don’t want to overwhelm the child trying to do it all at once. Students also vary as to when they are ready to move onto the final stage of reading – advanced comprehension. Comprehension is actually a rather involved skill. It uses the left side of the brain to analyze the letters and decode the words. It uses the right side of the brain to give meaning to those words. When you read the word dog, your brain pictures a certain breed of dog, and that picture will vary from reader to reader. The picture that pops into your mind is based on your personal experiences with dogs. Your brain retrieves those experiences and combines them into a sort of zip file that gives meaning to what you read. As you continue reading the passage, the sentence may give you more details – the oversized brown dog. In a split-second, your brain sifts through the zip file, discarding all the images and bits of information that no longer fit. If you have never seen an oversized brown dog, it will be hard for you to picture what the passage is talking about. Your comprehension will suffer. If you have seen oversized dogs, then your brain begins to process the possible breeds – German Shepherd, Great Dane, Greyhound, or Newfoundland. You continue reading – the oversized brown dog rushed toward me with teeth bared. Your brain sifts out even more information, and retrieves other experiences with angry, growling dogs. Your heart rate may increase as you recall those frightening experiences. But if you have never encountered an attacking dog, then you won’t have the same reaction. You will get less out of the passage because you can’t relate to it. We took this little side-trip to explain an important point that is often overlooked once our children are reading. Reading draws from experience. The larger the experience bank, the greater the likelihood that the student can relate to the story, and thereby get more out of the reading. Obviously, it takes time to build up this experience bank. It is not unusual for intermediate and high school reading programs to ask students to analyze what a passage means. To do so, students have to draw from their own experiences, retrieve similar information from what they’ve learned, make inferences about possible connections, and draw their own conclusions. If your child’s answer seems stilted, obvious, or lacking in substance, chances are she just doesn’t have enough life experiences to make the connections. Furthermore, the ability to make these inferences and connections is not automatic, particularly for concrete, detail-oriented learners. These skills have to be modeled and practiced before most students can analyze passages effectively. KEY WORDS: reading, phonic, comprehension |
|
To view more 'Teaching Tips' Articles please 'Log In' and visit the 'Achives' page. |
