A couple of weeks ago I began a new type of reading lesson with my eight yr old who has struggled to learn to read. I read about how Charlotte Mason, who was an educator in the 18 and early 1900's, suggested that parents work with their children to teach them how to read. This can be found in
The Original Homeschooling Series - Vol. 1So, what I will explain is how we have done it, not her words, though it was completely inspired by her words. I must also explain that I do still believe in teaching children to read with phonics, not whole language, however this child has proved to be the exception. He knows his phonics pretty well, we have been working on it for 3 years, however, this has NOT helped HIM become a fluent reader. We also believe he has Asperger's Syndrome, and that me be a contributing factor to his struggle to read.
Ok, so the first thing I did was to pick a poem. He loves poetry and he can be pretty silly, so I chose
Where the Sidewalk Ends to pull from, because I thought this would make it more fun for him! He likes a good punch line. The first poem we used was
Homemade Boat.
I made five copies of the poem in large type. I separated the title and the first couple of lines and the next sets of lines and put each set into a separate sandwich bag. I labeled them #1, #2....
I then cut each word apart (except for the Title, I leave that all one strip) and put them back in the bag and mixed them. I also prepared a half sheet of construction paper on which to mount a copy at the end of the reading lesson. One more thing I prepared was a spiral book of index cards.
On the BIG DAY, I sat him at the table and spread all the words from bag #1 out on a large plastic lid. I wrote the title of the poem,
Homemade Boat, on the dry erase board and while he looked at it, and I told him what it said. Then, he searched for his five copies of the title in his pile. He spread them out on the table as the start of five copies of the poem.
Then, I continued to write one word at a time on the board, telling him the word, him repeating the word and giving him time to find them and place them in the proper order in each of the sets of the poem (we left all of the lines on the white board until we completed the poem and I did every other line in alternating colors to help his concentration).
When he finished the title and first two lines, I took up four of the copies and put them back in the baggie and then we pasted the remaining one onto the half piece of construction paper.
He read what he had completed out loud. Any words that he stumbled on we added to the spiral index cards. Some days, we added other words to the card that were in the same word family. For example, we had the word by, so we added try and my. One day we had cling, so we added bring, sting ect.
The next time, he read over the sight words in our spiral index cards, read the part of the poem that he had finished on the construction paper, then added the next two lines as he had done the previous day. We did this each day until the poem was complete.
We have done three poems now and the impact has been awesome. He can easily read all three of the poems without missing a word. This weekend he pulled out the real book and proudly read all three of the poems to our friend!!!!!!!!!! That is huge for him!
