Jj is for Jottings 98.  Reading Difficult Words.

When your child starts to read aloud to you, they will often have problems with reading difficult words.  These words may be just long, or tricky in other ways, such as having several consonants together.  (See consonant clusters).  Or they could have vowel patterns which are unfamiliar, the rules for which they don’t yet know.  It is important to give children time to try to work out the word for themselves.  This helps develop reading skills.  However, when they get really stuck you will need to help them out.

QUESTIONS TO HELP WITH READING DIFFICULT WORDS.

1. Look at the picture. What word makes sense?
2. Look at the picture. What object can you see in the picture that might start with that letter?  (Sometimes the child will have lost the context, in which case you may need to re-read the sentence so far to help them fill in the word.)
3. What letter(s) does the word begin with? The sound that letter(s) makes is……?
4. What letter(s) can you see in the middle of the word? And the sound it makes?
5. What letter(s) is on the end of the word? Tell me what sound it makes.
6. Can you put those sounds together to make a word?

Questions 3, 4 and 5 are based on the assumption that the child knows their sound-letter links.   Question 6 presupposes that the child is able to blend sounds.  (And see here for more on sound blending.)

It is a good strategy to ask the child how they worked out the word.  This helps to reinforce the reading strategies they learn at school and from you at home.

SPOON-FEEDING DOESN’T HELP LEARNING.

If you just tell your child the word whenever they pause, they don’t learn anything.  It’s the old “giving a person a fish versus teaching them to fish” phenomenon.  Many of the children whom I have seen in schools (usually with speech/language and literacy problems) just come to a full stop at any long or unfamiliar word.  They apply no strategies to try and decode the word – they just toss it into the “too hard” basket.  Perhaps these children also have too much done for them at home in everyday life.  That’s not necessarily the case, since some children have real problems with literacy.  But sometimes as parents we need to step back and ask ourselves if we are encouraging independence in our children, or spoon-feeding them into a state of learned helplessness.

READING DIFFICULT WORDS FOR OLDER CHILDREN AND ADULTS.

As children advance in their reading, they will learn to recognise chunks of words and recurring patterns. And they recognise many more words on sight, too.   At this stage, they are less likely to need to break words into individual sounds.   Instead they will use syllables and other word chunks to break up and re-form a long word.  The same applies to adults.  Even though there are few words one doesn’t recognise as an adult, these are usually the long and complex ones.  Sometimes looking at syllables isn’t enough, and one has to return to breaking words or syllables into their component sounds.  Next time you come across an unfamiliar word, reflect on the strategies you used to unlock the word.  This might assist you to help your young reader do the same thing.

Check out the Facebook page: Aa is for Alpacas.