Reading Problems How Can I Help My Son

As a special education instructor who teaches struggling readers with different disabilities, I'm often crafting mental lists of things I wish parents knew about their dyslexic children. Nearly of import, I am eager for the parents of my students to understand that their children tin and will acquire to read, but it will accept time. In the procedure, it is important to recognize their many strengths and accomplishments in spite of their weaknesses in decoding, spelling or handwriting. I want parents to know that preparing their children to deal with their disability can inspire conviction and enable them to look forwards to a proud future in which they empathize their disability as well as their strengths, self-advocating for their unique learning style.

1. Discover Your Kid'southward Strengths

Your kid has many abilities and strengths. Perchance he can draw beautifully or has an amazing vocabulary. Perhaps she has corking listening skills or is an incredible athlete and team role player. Be sure to detect those talents and tell them you see them excelling at something.

Oft, I feel like my students' parents are so consumed by their kids' deficits in reading that they forget the things their children can do well. (Teachers are guilty of this, also.) If your child is artistic, apply that talent at home as a fashion for your child to show understanding of a story y'all read aloud; describe a picture of the trouble in the story or draw the main grapheme. Just considering your child has a word decoding weakness or messy handwriting or poor spelling doesn't hateful you can't button him or her to accomplish their all-time through a multifariousness of venues. Allowing, and encouraging, your children to utilise their strengths will heave their confidence.

2. Celebrate Every Success

Celebrate every success with a good job or a high five. Every single one. Don't rely on report carte grades to be the judge of your pupil'southward progress. Celebrate his or her reading a singular word correctly. See your kid on his/her reading level and celebrate the successes at that level. If your child is a showtime or practically a non-reader, celebrate decoding the word "at" or using a moving picture to solve an unknown word. If your child is commencement to read more fluently, celebrate when they cocky-correct an error. In my daily small group reading class, I notice myself giving praise constantly; information technology's because I desire them to know that I notice their progress and the things they practise well. If what we're reading is challenging, a smile and a "good task" can plough the whole lesson around. When I hear parents of my kids fussing at them virtually grades, I immediately find myself telling the parent about a pocket-sized, just wonderful, success his/her child had reading or writing that schoolhouse mean solar day. Harassing the students over report card grades isn't going to boost their conviction. Struggling readers need to know what they're doing right, non just their mistakes.

3. Be Honest with Yourself: Set Realistic Goals

A kid who is struggling with reading will not become on grade level overnight. You need to be honest with yourself and your child about his or her progress while setting realistic goals.

An easy mode to deal with the very, very long route (did I mention it's long?) to on-level reading is to ready some very short-term concrete goals. As a instructor who uses a reading-cess arrangement and leveled books, my goal for students often is to motility upwardly a single reading level. At abode, you might set a goal even to only practise reading every day. For instance, you might suggest that your child read a certain number of leveled, contained books in a calendar month (leveled books are books that your kid can read independently or with only a piffling help), or you lot might set a goal of reading an interesting chapter book with your kid. Make a inaugural and cross out each book or chapter, respectively, until yous achieve your goal.

Remember: you're setting a goal that is doable for you and your educatee that will positively affect his/her reading. What the goal really does is allow them to see that they're capable of reaching a goal, that they can be successful. You lot're giving them a chance to develop some other strength.

4. Don't Allow Poor Spelling Stop Your Child

If your child has a learning disability, at that place is a real possibility that he may actually struggle with spelling and remembering fifty-fifty very basic word patterns. Hither's the clandestine: That'southward okay. Teach your child to cope. Even if your children tin't spell, they still have thoughts and creativity that they need to limited. Don't let poor spelling make your child mute. Be sure to acknowledge their adept ideas. Encourage them to apply a dictionary, spell-check or text-prediction software. Have your children start their very ain personal word dictionary every bit a tool to utilize when they write. Talk to your student'southward instructor. Look into what technology or other strategies in that location might be to help your child become more than successful. In that location's a lot out at that place, but you lot won't find much if you're too decorated pointing out that your kid can't spell.

5. Share Your Ain Difficulties with Your Kids

Testify your kid that you still piece of work at things that are hard for you, too. Albeit that you besides have things you wrestle with tin provide support and help your struggling reader empathise that people accept different strengths and weaknesses. An anecdote I frequently share with my frustrated readers is how I have e'er had terrible mitt-to-heart coordination. And as an adult, I even maintain a joke with the people I interact regularly: "Do not throw annihilation to me or expect me to throw something to y'all." That'south right; I am terrible at nearly every sport. All the same, I'll ever give information technology a shot, and I try. When I'm on family vacation and information technology's time for some beach volleyball, you'll detect me flailing abreast the cyberspace or nose-diving into the sand. The moral: kids (and adults) should try things they're not great at, and it is helpful to run into role models working on things that don't come easily to them.

When it comes to reading, bear in mind that when something is difficult and doesn't come easy, y'all generally just apartment out don't want to do it! What makes struggling readers fifty-fifty more anxious about reading is the pressure they're getting both at schoolhouse and at home to larn to read. (This is yet another reason why setting goals and celebrating every small success are so important.) And so when they know that y'all are working on things that are difficult for you, it helps have the pressure off them and makes their struggle less lonely.

6. Read Aloud to Your Kid. Information technology'south Fun and Helpful

Your dyslexic reader tin exercise more . . . if y'all help. Read to your kid every unmarried day. Hearing someone else read has the amazing possibility of sparking creativity and interest and likewise offers a risk to work on comprehension without the battle of decoding the text. A struggling reader may only be able to read short, curt books with scant  involvement or depth, which offer little motivation to continue to piece of work on reading. When you read aloud or accept a program such as an iPad app that reads books aloud (phone call it old-fashioned, but a real man reading to children is better), your child has the opportunity to focus on the meaning of the words and content. They develop groundwork knowledge and information technology allows them to use their imagination. Reading books to your child (or listening to sound books) allows him or her to get into books that his peers are reading and holds interest because they are age-appropriate. The additional bonus to reading with your child? You lot can offering explanations and further detail when needed.

7. Kids Experience Supported When They See Parents and Teachers Working Together to Aid Them

Your kid'due south education is not a private affair that excludes your child. It's the kid's education! He or she needs to know what's going on; otherwise, it'southward a lost opportunity for learning self-advocacy. She's non going to learn anything when yous tell her to become somewhere else while you and the teacher tell each other secrets nearly her. Do your kids a favor and tell them where they stand academically, what their talents are, what they need assistance with and the plan for helping them learn. Remember: y'all, the parents, will accept a plan and a goal in mind! Also think that your child's teacher will take a plan also. Kids feel supported when they run across parents and teachers working together to aid them instead of being shuffled off into a corner. Read more in Education Editor Kyle Redford's piece, The Privacy Dilemma.

8. Small Steps Can Bring Big Improvements

The listing of enrichment activities for boosting language and reading skills could go on and on, but there is one more important thing to remember: It doesn't need to exist complicated. If your child is simply offset to read or is a very deadening reader, go over the alphabet and letter sounds. Interruption apart short CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words (sit down, chapeau, log and so on), and blend these sounds together (/j/ /o/ /b/; task). For more than ideas, see Expert Practices: Developing a Foundation for Reading.

If your child is a little more contained, sit with her, assist her with hard words as she reads, maybe read aloud a chapter of a fun book to her every night before bed. Talk about what happened in the story, the characters and the setting; what's the problem in the story? Read a nonfiction book and talk about what you all learned from the text.

If your struggling child is older, let her exist the teacher and read her books to siblings. Or, in our tech-obsessed civilisation, teach your kid to grab a camera or recorder and record videos or audio notes of herself reading, then follow along with them to cheque for errors. For more ideas to share with your child, see Tips from Dyslexic Students for Dyslexic Students.

9. It's Okay to Read Slowly

Nigh dyslexics will be slow readers for life, and that's okay. They have many more talents to offering, and their reading will improve in other ways with proper interventions. If your child is reading beneath a mid-2d grade level, don't worry about fluency or speed. Focus on accuracy, or reading the words correctly, and don't pressure him to read faster. Instead, give him strategies to help him remember what he read, such equally writing a sentence or two or drawing a film of what happened on each folio (or in each chapter). Your child is going to live with a learning inability as an developed. Teach him how to deal with information technology now, so he'll be meliorate able to navigate the world later. And for inspiration for both parent and child, see our success stories.

10. Teach Them How to Assistance Themselves

If your child has been diagnosed with dyslexia, he or she will non outgrow it, but that doesn't mean your child won't learn how to read or be successful. If y'all teach your child how to cope and deal with his/her disability now, you're doing your child an incredible favor. Teach your children to advocate for themselves. Teach them how to ask for help. Teach them how to empathize their strengths and weaknesses. Teach them about available resource and how to ensure they receive the accommodations they need for success. If you teach your children to do this at school, they're going to go into the world feeling confident and expecting success; they'll know how they fit in and what they need to do to keep upwards. And that's worth more than being able to read 180 words per minute.

Joshua Jenkins is a Literacy Specialist in Newton, Massachusetts. A Teach for America alum, Jenkins spent five years as a special instruction teacher in New Orleans.

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Source: https://dyslexia.yale.edu/resources/parents/what-parents-can-do/ten-things-to-help-your-struggling-reader/

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