When there is any type of difficulty in learning the most common reaction for parents or educators is to pile on more work in that area.

Reading is no exception.

As with any other type of problem, piling on more practice, without addressing the cause, can make things worse.

In the long run it can make reading even more difficult.
The child can become very uncomfortable reading at home or out loud.

And then the battles begin.

If you think about it successful reading is made up of a number of smaller skills.

(Caveat. Don't let the following terms confuse you. When we get to the answers things will be really easy. Lets just get this technical jargon out of the way shall we)

• Phonemic Awareness - the ability to recognize that a spoken word is composed of a sequence of individual sounds (phonemes). Children who are unaware that words consist of individual sounds will have difficulty in decoding.
• Visual Memory - The ability to store and retrieve symbols. The ability to visualize an image.
• Visual Discrimination - The ability to perceive differences and likenesses in words.
• Auditory Discrimination - The ability to recognize the differences in sounds (This has nothing to do with a hearing test)

and the ability to combine all of these skills so that a word, sentence, or paragraph has meaning.

It is no wonder some students struggle to read!

So the big takeaway here is that reading is actually made up of many smaller skills. Correct those skills and reading will become easy.

We've been working with children for years on these basic skills. Once you know how, they are actually very easy to correct.

Reading problems are actually due to more basic problems such as problems in basic visual or auditory skills?

When I say this many people assume I'm saying the child has a hard time seeing or hearing, but this is not at all what I mean.

The problems are things like having a hard time differentiating between some written characters or sounds.

Or it may be that they are having a hard time holding things in visual memory. These are skills that can be corrected.

Children often really don't understand the structure of words. They get frustrated and resort to guessing. The path of guessing at words will not lead to success.

They have trouble with sight words (such as and - or - the).

Dyslexics have it even worse as their eyes will actually draw in and insert letters from other words on the page. They actually see letters in words that are not really there. Their world is in motion and that motion needs to be stilled for reading success.

So what is the big secret to reading success?

The problem is weaknesses in visual and auditory senses. We already know that.

The answer is...

Integrate Another Sense!

Poor readers, being weak in visual and/or auditory skills actually tend to rely on tactile skills. So let them.

By using a multi-sensory approach students quite guessing and sound out/decode words.

Students go all the way back (if needed) to letter/sound recognition, vowels, blends, digraphs and then progress to vowel consonant words,vowel / consonant / vowel words, four letter blends and endings, long vowel words, and multi-syllabic words.

And this is all amazingly easy to do!

So shall we get started?

Enter your name and email in the form in the right and I'll send you an email course on correcting learning problems.