Currently, Younger Daughter is reading Amelia Bedelia, besides slowly working through the phonics at the back of Why Johnny Can't Read. I've started using a technique I read about somewhere on the web: holding a bookmark just under the line of text she's reading, to help prevent "wandering eyes", and keep her reading in sequence. Her fluency is improving a lot, and I think she's reaching the point where she can really enjoy the story.
Sounds like good progress! I had success with the blocking the text with a bookmark, too. I found that after I did this for about a week with my daughter, she didn't need me to do it anymore. I think my daughter got used to hunting around the page for clues at school and this broke her of that habit. I found a book at the library called "Reading Rescue 1-2-3" by Peggy M. Wilber and she recommends using a technique called "To,With,By". I found this description for you: http://www.succeedtoread.com/selection.html
ReplyDeleteSo glad that you're making progress! The bookmark or something below the text also helps if YD has slight vision problems (like one eye weaker than the other). My son has one weaker eye, and the eye doctor recommended that technique to help with his reading - huge improvement! Much less likely to skip lines or jump ahead.
ReplyDelete@Kim, I'll provide a true link:
ReplyDeleteTeach a Child to Read
This method has a lot of repetition: you read the selection to the child twice, with the child twice, and then the child reads it by himself twice.
There may be a place for this, but for the moment it's not what I'm looking for to teach Younger Daughter. If she reads a selection several times, it's giving her a chance to memorize and guess instead of looking at the letters of each word.
@honu-giri, that's interesting about vision problems and using the bookmark technique. Did you tell your son's teacher? It's the kind of thing teachers should be aware of ...