Recently we were contacted by a student who wanted to improve his reading fluency before attending college. He had completed a full course of "Wilson and Orton-Gillingham" yet his reading was still slow and effortful. He asked, "Is there anything I can do to improve...
Learning Irregular Words: Activities and Games [Premium]
Irregular words don’t fit the standard sounding out convention, but because they can occur commonly in text, they need additional practice to be recognized quickly. How do you help students practice, but not be guilty of “drill and kill”? Rote memorization is also difficult for many dyslexic students so that not only is repetition inefficient, it often introduces unwanted errors. Having a toolkit of games and various activities to change up the learning practice can make the session fly by and you may be surprised how much better the information is remembered later. In the videos below, check out low tech ways to change things up and make practice more fun and less drudgery. Because there are so many spelling […]
Reading Fluency: What is Timed Guided Repeated Reading and Why Should Students Do It? [Premium]
In a recent report in the Journal of Learning Disabilities, Lee and Yoon reported that repeated reading had significant beneficial effects on the reading fluency of students with a reading disability. Listening to the passage first increased the benefit. Excerpt: “Reading the passage at least four times increased reading fluency more than two to three times…repetition is a critical variable, and automaticity was based on retrieval (memory) rather than adjustment of reading procedures (e.g. word decoding strategies… The listening passage preview with the proper prosody that was modeled by the teachers may have enhanced understanding of text and reduced the moderator of negative emotion (e.g. confusion, anxiety, frustration) presumed or students with RD (e.g. “with listening passage preview there is less anxiety.” N.B. Fluency practice […]