Reading

Today Hannah went back to school. She was happy to go and obviously looking forward to seeing her friends. I hope she has a good term.

I have been doing some reading with her over the break. Her spec ed teacher said in our last meeting that level 3 of the PM readers are the ones she is using with Hannah - they are more challenging for her. I have some level 1 ones that I was using over the holidays. I have videoed her reading - will try and upload one later.

Hannah loves books - always has. Her reading though seems idiosyncratic to me - The level 1 readers are very repetitive - eg Every page in the book we have just done has "Look at the ..." and the child uses the picture to decide on the last word. When I started with Hannah I had to prompt her every single time for the word look. It was starting to drive me crazy. I tried a couple of things to try and help her recognise the word more automatically and in a variety of contexts. The most successful was the blocks from Make a Word. I haven't got her to write it out yet but that is probably what I will try next time the opportunity arises. She has almost conquered that one so I have begun the new book which has "Look at the ... said the pencil" in it. This time I began using the blocks for support.

There is a sight word app on her ipad that I like - she is going quite well with it although 10 is her prime, 15 on a good day and by 20 she is over it - I try to work with her until she gets 10 right first go. Her error rate is usually between 5%-33% depending on how hard the settings are. At the moment I have it on preschool and Kindy words with a min choice from 3 and a max choice from 4 words. It has been interesting to then test her vocab with the flash cards from the Make a Word set - I simply ask "What word?"

Sometimes she is clearly looking at the holistic shape of the word - so bag often gets confused for dog.At other times I think she sees the last letter and then guesses at the word. Too often if in doubt she says 'down' so I have also started to go over that one using the blocks although I think I might just avoid it for a while until she is stronger on the ones in her books. I have also been impressed with her letter recognition skills and her knowledge of phonics although she needs help to 'put the sounds together' in a 3 letter word she can do it fairly easily. She finds cued artic and signed english helpful so in the video (when I find out how to upload it) you can see her sign 'the'. We are also using these to help prompt her sentence structure and length of utterance in speech...

I worry that there are so many gaps in her ability to 'read' yet I know her understanding and comprehension are quite good. It must be very frustrating for the little girl - it sure is for me!

In the video you can see her referring to the blocks and using signed english as well. The last page is bird but she often just looks at the 'b..' and says 'bat'. She was worried her father was going to go out without her so is a little preoccupied in this clip - but you get the idea....