Back to School - Are you concerned about your child's resistance to reading?
If you are a parent, your children likely either recently returned back to school or are prepping to do so soon. This time of year many parents are starting to return to thoughts of how their children are doing, and where they are in some of their skills.
Reading is one of those things that is often top of mind for many parents as reading ability bleeds into all other subject areas. If your child is struggling with reading and you would love some extra tips and support, read on.
This scenario may seem familiar to many of you:
Your child seems very frustrated with the whole process of reading. When they are supposed to be reading in school, doing practice reading at home, or when you are encouraging them to read for leisure, you are met with negativity. You are met with a push-back. You are met with disinterest. You may hear things such as:
“This is boring”
“I just don’t like to read”
“I don’t want to do this right now”
“Why do I have to read?”
As a parent, this can feel frustrating and confusing. You may have had visions of lovely afternoons of reading together on the couch or snuggling up in bed to share books. So what is going on?
Reading may seem simple and straightforward at first glance, but the skills that are required for reading are multi-layered. And reading skills start long before you sit down with an actual book. There are lots of what we call “pre-reading” skills that are important first steps to reading.
One of the key terms you may hear with respect to reading is called phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is “the ability to recognize and distinguish between the sounds used in spoken language, including syllables, rhymes, and phonemes“[1]. It is a continuum of less complex activities such as segmenting sentences into words, into more complex such as segmenting and blending individual phonemes (distinct units of sound that letters or combination of letters make). Phonological awareness matters because it has been well documented that phonological awareness is a predictor of future reading ability.
Some of the things that parents might see when there are issues with these pre-reading and reading skills include struggles with:
Rhyming
Breaking down the individual sounds you hear in a word
Counting out syllables
Blending sounds together to create a word
Identifying onsets and rimes (beginning sound and everything left after the beginning sound in a word)
Changing out onsets and rimes
Spelling a word by sound
Playing with the different aspects of language
Understanding that often the negativity that your child may be exhibiting towards reading can be because they are struggling with some of these aspects, can provide great insight into the how and the why.
Furthermore, children with learning differences in reading, such as dyslexia, - even if they are out of the pre-reading stage of learning about and gaining phonological awareness skills (ie. they are older children) - often have phonological awareness deficits.
The value of phonological awareness to reading is important to understand as we try to find ways to help our children with learning differences in their journey back to the classroom this year. A few strategies that may help your child:
Play games with your kids (think while you are driving in the car, at the dinner table, or on a walk!) that practice rhyming, playing with sounds (inserting or deleting initial or ending sounds onto words), substituting sounds in words (what happens if I replace the /d/ in dog with /l/)
Use playdough, fidget poppers or poker chips to represent the different sounds in words
Sing songs with rhyming words (Down by the Bay), songs where you exchange letters (Sarah, Sarah Bo Barrah, Banana Fannah, Fo Farrah…)
Use alliteration to make up funny sentences
And more….
We have downloadable PDF resources on our Back to School page which can help you to further find ways to support your pre-readers as well as your readers with learning differences, to not only work on their skills, but there are lots of ways that they can have fun while they do it (because don’t we all want learning to be FUN?!?).
Check out our Back to School page here for this pdf and more resources/tools.
——————————————-
Written by Jillian Watson, B.Ed., M.Ed., OCT
____________________________
References
[1} https://dictionary.apa.org/phonological-awareness