1. Intervene early! Reading disabilities are considered the most common learning disability and often go undiagnosed and untreated until it is too late for easy recovery. A child with a reading disability who is not identified until third grade or later is already years behind her classmates. This is a gap that must be closed if the boy is ever to catch up with her peers. The best intervention is in kindergarten or recovery from first grade.
2. Teaches phonics. Through phonics, children learn to associate sounds and form connections with the word recognition and decoding skills necessary for reading. Research clearly demonstrates that phonemic awareness performance is an important predictor of long-term success in reading and spelling. In fact, according to the International Reading Association, phonemic recognition skills in kindergarten and first grade seem to be the most important predictor of successful reading acquisition.
3. Teaches spelling. Spelling and reading are based on the same mental representations of a word. The correlation between spelling and reading comprehension is high because both depend on language proficiency. The more deeply and methodically a student knows a word, the more likely they are to recognize it, read it, spell it, write it, and use it appropriately in speaking and writing.
4. Teach writing. Start teaching writing in preschool and kindergarten. Learning to write engages the brain in repetition and recall of how letters and sounds reflect meaning, addresses numerous reading and cognitive skills, and helps activate both the reading and spelling areas of the brain.
5. Teach handwriting. Technology is a fun writing tool for kids, but it doesn’t engage the early reading brain in the same helpful way as learning to move a pencil across the page to use letters as sound images. Brain scan studies show that early lessons in letter formation help activate and coordinate reading connections in the brain.
6. Repetition, repetition, repetition. A child’s brain feeds on repetition so that doing things like reading is automatic and fluid. Use repetition in early grades to read aloud, to rhyme, to match letters to sounds, to write letters of the alphabet, to spell, to sound out words, to automatically read sight words, to make sense of what printed. Children thrive on it. So make it fun!
7. Never give up on your child. Keep your expectations high for your child and your future reader. We owe it to our children to show our support, provide them with every resource possible to help them, and provide them with the necessary skills to learn and communicate throughout their education and lives.
