Help with Sight Reading

[Guest guest]

I need help with teaching sight reading for my 5 yr old who knows all the

letters and sounds. I started with the dolce pre primer words and just taught

the words that have a different starting letter.Now she has about 15-17 words.

the minute, I introduce a word which starts with the same letter as the one that

she alreday mastered, she is confused. I think she only looked at the first

letter when learning the word and the minute she saw the letter, she didn't even

look at the other letters and she concluded it as the word. Ex: she knows 'red',

now I introduced, 'rain', she stills says that as 'red'. If she learnt to say

'rain', she will forget 'red'.she will identify any word starting with 'r' as

'rain'. Same issue with letter 'p', she knew 'play', I introduced 'pretzel', but

she still called it 'play'. After many trials of teacging 'pretzel', she forgot

'play' and now identifes all 'p' words a 'pretzel'.

The strategy that I am now using is asking her to spell the word and writing

both the same letter satrting words side by side. I now have rain and red in the

field and ask her to point to red and then rain and do it that way. But she is

having a very hard time.

Any strategies to help teach sight reading in an effective way? A way that can

be maintained with less confusion. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Guest guest]

Howdy,

I'll say up front that I'm a believer in at least taking a stab at teaching

phonetic reading to children - esp. if they know letters and sounds, since those

are helpful, although not necessary, prerequisites. (If that's an approach that

would be of interest, Sigfried Engelmann's " Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy

Lessons "

http://www.startreading.com/

is a cost-effective program to take a look at). After a somewhat unsuccessful

foray into sight reading we used Engelmann much more successfully and then went

into Dolch and Fry words starting with known decoding.

On sight-reading, I was thinking about the problem of getting " stuck " on the

" red " and " rain " that you described - this reminds me of what I call the

flip-flop effect that can happen when teaching things that might look similar

serially and singly (my daughter had a lot of problems with that and we had to

do something different to get around it). If something with an " A " is " apple " ,

and is only " apple " for awhile, then when " alligator " or some other " A " word is

introduced, the tendency is to go to " apple " - that's true for any child because

of overselecting for the " a " at the beginning of the word. Correct that enough

times for a single alternative and the tendency will be to go to " alligator " ,

unless the child can discern a rule or a reason.

What I've done with my daughter that were helpful to us in countering the

flip-flop effect:

Show right out of the chute that all words starting with a particular letter are

not the single and only word. When I start with a concept, I do what I call a

" courtesy run " by laying a fairly large field out and explicitly pointing out

what they are and rehearsing them together. If I was doing " b " words (and to

keep from having mixed targets, I would pick known tacts at least at first so

that visual recognition/discrimination would be the only skill I'm worrying

about) I would put 5 or 6 out and start teaching them - " bug " , " bear " , " bead " ,

" big " , bread, (etc.) That gives a clue that they are not the same thing and that

a " b " at the beginning is not always going to be " bug " .

How to proceed kind of depends on the student - since sight reading, per se, is

kind of like any other visual discrimination skill, one could approach it from

receptive selection, tacting, and in the case where the sight words are nouns or

verbs, picture/object to word or word to picture/object matching might be a way

to slow down for the discrimination, perhaps bolster comprehension, and might be

more fun. There are also bingo and lotto games that are helpful adjuncts to

sight-reading. FWIW, Quizmo Sight reading bingo was a game my daughter liked as

she went along (and generalized turn-taking and game play as well).

http://www.eaieducation.com/103008.html

If you're interested in texts or reading packages, a pretty inexpensive text

that might be helpful to take a look at for ideas on approaching sight reading

for non-typical learners, is

Teaching Reading to Children With Down Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and

Teachers. Pat Oewein.

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Reading-Children-Down-Syndrome/dp/0933149557

Amazon has it, but another big box book chain might also carry it if you want to

do a page browse in person.

There's also the Edmark program, which some people like a great deal (I wish I

could have, but my daughter was not successful with Edmark which is why we went

to " 100 Easy Lessons " ).

http://www.superduperinc.com/products/view.aspx?stid=198

As I said, it kind of depends on the student and which approach(es) is/are most

successful. I don't know if any, all or none of these suggestions are helpful to

you, but I hope there's some ideas. I'm sure that others on list also have other

ideas and approaches to suggest.

Good luck! Have a great summer.

Regina Claypool-Frey

http://www.precisionteaching.com

>

> I need help with teaching sight reading for my 5 yr old who knows all the

letters and sounds. I started with the dolce pre primer words and just taught

the words that have a different starting letter.Now she has about 15-17 words.

the minute, I introduce a word which starts with the same letter as the one that

she alreday mastered, she is confused. I think she only looked at the first

letter when learning the word and the minute she saw the letter, she didn't even

look at the other letters and she concluded it as the word. Ex: she knows 'red',

now I introduced, 'rain', she stills says that as 'red'. If she learnt to say

'rain', she will forget 'red'.she will identify any word starting with 'r' as

'rain'. Same issue with letter 'p', she knew 'play', I introduced 'pretzel', but

she still called it 'play'. After many trials of teacging 'pretzel', she forgot

'play' and now identifes all 'p' words a 'pretzel'.

>

> The strategy that I am now using is asking her to spell the word and writing

both the same letter satrting words side by side. I now have rain and red in the

field and ask her to point to red and then rain and do it that way. But she is

having a very hard time.

>

> Any strategies to help teach sight reading in an effective way? A way that can

be maintained with less confusion. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

>