I have reconnected with H., whom I worked with over Christmas. Blog posts about our previous work are here.
It is a pleasure to see him again. He is much more poised, and looks to have grown inches in the last 6 months. He has been receiving intermittent tutoring, and received a school award at graduation for “Most Improved Reader”.
We got to work. His reading is more confident but he is still at the read-aloud stage, he makes too many errors to read a chapter book to himself. He decodes the words and understands the surface gloss, but doesn’t catch irony or humor. I would rate him as a grade-2 reader. The video has a 1-minute sample of our ‘fingerpoint reading’.
The ‘Matthew Effect’ describes the widening reading gap between fast and slow starters. Strong readers tend to read more and become even stronger. Weak readers tend to avoid books, and increasingly fall behind. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
Overcoming the Matthew Effect requires that a poor reader read MORE than a good reader. It is not impossible, but requires ferocious focus and intensity. H. starts high school in September, and there is no time to lose. Today we read for about 90 minutes, and then wrote a short hamburger essay about our day. We will work on reading, writing, and spelling for 2-3 hours a day through the summer. EVERY DAY.
Tomorrow I will start posting on specific techniques we are using. Please follow us with your child. You will be amazed at how fast H. will improve, and your child can too. (Start with the free BLENDING program here.)
Future postings will appear in the ‘Summer of Repairing Dyslexia’ blog.
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