After a really good meeting last week, we really established that reading is what we are going to work on mostly. Maria speaks and writes very well, but when it comes to sounding out words, she struggles a little. So this week, we did a little extensive reading. She had gotten a book from the library, and was really enjoying it and was understanding it, so we just went with that. She is pretty good on vocabulary, so we just went with it. This book she understood for the most part, there was about a word a paragraph in average that she didn't know. The main trouble came about when she had trouble saying the word, and if she said it wrong, she didn't know what the word meant, because she knows words by sound. So we would stop ever few paragraphs, and go over the words she either didn't know, or words she said wrong. I decided not to stop her every time she made an error, but rather to let her go a bit, and then go over them. I feel that if I just corrected her as she went, it would be harder to remember the corrections, because she is focusing on reading and understanding the story (which is the ultimate goal.) After we did this for about 40 minutes, we switched into a format where I read and moved my finger under the word I was reading, and she followed along as I read looking at the words. I don't know if this helped much, she said it did, and I know it help me learn to read out loud when my mom did that with me. At the end we covered a few points, and I gave her about 10 books that I am not using any more. They were the Illustrated Classics series, and I have about 45 of them. I am not using them any more, and she loves them (that is what we were reading out of last week.) I am just going to keep with this plan, and maybe add a few different reading related things as time goes on.
Your correction process sounds good. I like that you are focused on the ultimate goal, too. I do have an opinion about reading with the finger. As a child, I did that, too. However, I got so dependent on using my finger to read that I immediately struggled reading when my teachers made me keep my hand away from the page. Reading with my finger to focus my eyes kept me on a word by word reading pattern that lasted for years. I took a speed reading course my senior year in high school, and it taught me to touch my pen at three equally spaced spots on a line with textbooks (two if the column was narrow like in a novel, one if it was like a newspaper column). It forced my eyes to catch groups of words at once. I had to do extensive reading to get past my fear of missing a word or of having less than 100 percent comprehension. It did break me from a word by word reading pattern that made me avoid extensive reading. All that is to say, "Careful where you point your finger!"
ReplyDelete