Strategise and hone your reading and writing skills

We all want our kids to read more and write better, but every now and then, unwittingly, these 2 habits are put on the backburner. Reasons that look justified: the child has exams, the child is enrolled in a lot of classes, the child has a lot of school work, and so on.

When we take away a storybook due to school work, we teach the kids that reading is not a fundamental habit to develop and it's something to do when only we have a lot of free time that would otherwise go into T.V. or video games. When storybooks are used as better substitutes for screen time, reading doesn't develop as a life skill, as a habit. 

Research shows that children must read something for fun - this is very different from the study- for at least 15 minutes a day and they must write something for fun - which is again very different from the studies- for at least 15 minutes a day. Fun reading and fun writing for oneself have a very positive effect on the brain. This as a habit keeps us tuned to the entire process. Of course, you don't win a marathon in the middle of a school year if you walk/run only during the vacations.

What to read quickly: 

Just a passage or a paragraph, if not a complete story

A short comic story

A short paragraph from an encyclopedia

An article from a magazine or newspaper

What to write quickly:

A paragraph on grandfather's narration of one of his past experiences

A new ending to an old classic story

A paragraph with a very random and enticing sentence

A fresh perspective (If I were a dining table)

Taking a break from fun reading and fun writing is detrimental to the organic process of creativity, imagination, language memory, flow, formatting, summary skills, and most importantly -  confidence.

Kids cannot have interest in and sustained focus while reading when reading becomes a holiday reading. Kids who don't write for fun every day find it difficult to suddenly show their best creativity when an exam or a competition demands it.

Fun reading and fun writing are as primary as bathing and brushing teeth every day. Some time management is all we need. Again, it's important to raise readers and writers who can read and write well into their adulthood. 

Ideas to help reluctant readers

Reading is an essential life-skill. We must be able to read, understand and follow prints, which are there all around us.

To learn to read is tough. Many people consider reading as a 1-step milestone and make statements like, “When will my child learn reading?”

Reading is like walking perhaps. Like walking involves several prerequisites, reading does too. Like walking requires development of several skills, reading does too. If a child is struggling with reading, it simply means the delay/lack of a prerequisite.

Let’s have a look at the prerequisites:

1.    Alphabet recognition

2.    Alphabet-sound relationship

3.    Analysis and synthesis skills

4.    Vocabulary

5.    Sensory integration

6.    Visual-spatial skill

7.    Visual memory

8.    Auditory closure

9.    Auditory memory

10.Auditory discrimination

11.Interest

12.Confidence and Self-motivation

Common problems observed in reading:

1.    Random guesses

2.    Poor comprehension

3.    Confusion with sounds

4.    Skipping words/lines

5.    Reversals of letter sequences

6.    Mirroring of letters

7.    Lack of interest

8.    Fear of failure

9.    Laziness

10. Poor memory of the read material

Common interventions:

Observe the kind of error the child makes and rectify accordingly. If the child reads a few letters of a word and guesses the rest of it (bride as bread), it could be due to poor vocabulary (bride is less familiar than bread), or poor auditory discrimination (/ide/ sounds similar to /ead/ to the child), or anxiety (reads first few letters and says the first word that comes to mind to avoid being called dumb or lazy), or something else. Reading analysis is the key to good help.

Few simple techniques:

1.    Give more emphasis to coding-decoding (analysis and synthesis) of letters’ combinations than on individual letter sounds

2.    Associate words/sentences with pictures and colors. They keep the right-brain engaged enough for the left-brain to focus on text.

3.    Use multi-sensory methods for better sensory integration while reading. Let the tactile, motor, visual, auditory memory lead to better retention and interest.

4.    Use the system of “word of the week”, “word of the day”. Use the chosen words in various ways.

5.    Let the child teach. Teaching is the best way to learn.

6.    Show usefulness of reading. Show how reading is useful in daily life, beyond classroom. Show, not preach!

7.    Expose the child to varieties. Get illustrated books, comics, semi-graphic chapter books, puzzles books, quiz books to add to stories and encyclopedia.

Parting wisdom:

Reading should be fun. It shouldn’t be always followed by a quick comprehension to ‘test’ the child.

Read and be a good role model. Parents don’t read books these days and children haven’t seen parents during their childhood. Children do as they see. So read, create a ‘bookmosphere’ at home and you will see a change!

Ways to improve auditory processing skills in children

Poor auditory processing skill is an often neglected and undiagnosed problem that around 5% of children face. It has symptoms that overlap with ADHD, ADD, ASD, LD, which makes it very difficult for a parent to understand the real issue. Presence of poor auditory processing skill often leads to over-diagnosis of the other disorders mentioned above.

Typical symptoms that a child with poor auditory processes faces are:

·          Difficulty in following instructions

·          Difficulty in differentiating subtly different words

·          Over/under sensitivity to sounds around

·          Speech delay/difficulty

·          Difficulty in sound articulation

·          Difficulty in following a conversation

Activities for strengthening auditory processes:

·        Auditory reception (Comprehension: the child listens to an auditory input and responds to the relevant questions asked).

·        Auditory figure ground (list of heterogeneous words is given to the child and the child has to group the words based on some concept. E.g. tree, river, mountain, snakes, tiger ---> Jungle).

·        Auditory discrimination ( giving words like pin- pen, sake- sale, time- chime and asking him whether they are different or not. Lip reading shouldn’t facilitate the process. Recognizing different animal sounds is also very helpful).

·        Auditory sequential memory (numbers or letters are given to the child and the child repeats them in the same sequence. E.g. 2,7,4 said by the teacher and the child repeats).

·        Auditory closure (a word is spelled with certain letter missing and the child has to give the missing letter. E.g. For_st, _ne).

·        Auditory concept (giving similarities and differences between certain words. E.g. Forest and zoo, mango and banana, cat and rat).

·        List of words given for immediate recall and delayed recall.

·        Reading short stories and recalling them.

·        Repetition of sentences.

·        Word pair recall of both familiar(cow-milk, paper-pencil) and unfamiliar pairs(paper-water, spoon-eraser). Child is told all the words in pair, then one word of each pair is asked and he should say the other word.

·        Word game (first person says one word, second person says the first word and gives another word , first person says the first two words and gives another word, and so on).

This is not an exhaustive list of activities but just an idea of what can be done when you observe any auditory problem happening in your child. In fact, it is a good idea to do these activities anyways in all kids in the foundation years to strengthen their auditory focus and processes. 

Disclaimer: this write-up is not a diagnostic and therapeutic tool for Auditory Processing Disorder (APD)

Which book to choose

Many of us, these days, are consciously trying to inculcate reading habits in our children. We try to read books in front of children to encourage them to copy the habit. We read books with them to make sure that they do read. We take memberships of various libraries and make visits regularly to take new books for our children. 

In all these efforts that we make, we often find ourselves in a deep confusion. Some common questions which pop-up when we are standing in the sea of books in a bookstore are “Which book should I take for my child?” or “It says 4-5 years, but will my 5 year old one be able to read it?” or “How do I know which books are trending these days? Are the trending books good enough?” or “Do I take a book which he can read by himself or which I need to read and explain to him?”

There are many ways in which you choose. You may choose according to the age level. You just see the age mentioned on the cover and take it. Or you may want to choose according to what everyone is reading these days. So it’s a Geronimo Stilton for your 8 year old one, case closed. Or you may want your child to read books on science. So you pick up the first science book on the shelf you can find. You find it tough for him, but you decide to read it to him.

But in all these ways, we are not taking into consideration the most important factor- i.e. the reading level of the child. the child may be in grade 2, but he may be well able to self-read and comprehend a grade 3 book. Or, he may be in grade 1 and can do self-reading of kindergarten books and assisted-reading of grade 1 books. 

An imposed book, a too difficult book, a too easy book will never be able to generate and sustain the much required reading passion which is fading in the gen-Y. Our children may shy away from reading (and which may look like laziness or defiance to us) if they don’t get the right book.

So, when we are going to pick up a book for the child, we should take care of these factors:

1.     The self-reading level

2.     Reading comprehension level

3.     The assisted-reading level

4.     Listening comprehension level

5.     Interest areas

A book chosen with these criteria in mind is the best pick. If your child can self-read and self-comprehend a book easily, his/her interest is definitely going to go up.

We should take this as a responsibility on us to be able to suggest the right book to our children. We can enjoy bookworms around us then.

Visual skills in children

There is a difference between vision and visual skills. One may have good vision but poor visual skills, and vice-versa. Many times when child is unable to write, draw properly, his parents find themselves at their wit’s end running from one optometrist to another. With the eye-sight in place, they don’t know what to do. The underlying reason could be one or more underdeveloped visual skills.

Visual skills are of many types, like visual discrimination, visual motor coordination, visual perception, visual sequencing, visual memory, visual analysis and synthesis etc.

In any activity, many visual skills work simultaneously. But many activities have one main base skill. We need to first find out which activities are difficult for the child. This helps us in finding out the visual skills that need to be enhanced.


Few activities and their related visual skills:

Visual skill	Chief activities
Visual motor coordination	Beading, lacing, threading, cutting, pasting, coloring
Visual perception	Mazes
Visual tracking	Copy-writing
Visual closure	Completing the figure
Visual sequence	Pattern, join the dots, what comes next
Visual analysis and synthesis	Puzzles
Visual memory	Recalling written material, pictures, objects, routes Copying text/figures

While each activity involves more than one visual skill, the above mentioned ones are the chief skills. Thus if a child is unable to do beading and has proper vision, his visual motor coordination may be poor and may need to be enhanced. Similarly, if a child is unable to copy text from the board in school, he may be having poor visual tracking skills or poor visual memory.

Here are some activities mentioned to generally strengthen the visual skills of a child.

1.     Do activities that involve beading, dabbing, lacing, threading, cutting, pasting, finger printing. Sticking ‘daals’ on a line or cutting on lines is also helpful.

2.     Grid copying (of lines, shapes, figures). You make a grid with design and give a blank grid to the child for copying. It can also be used for visual memory where the child sees the grid and makes it from memory in his blank grid.

3.     Real object drawing. You give an object to the child and he has to draw it.

4.     Picture copying. You give a picture to the child and he has to copy it

5.     Activities on sequencing (what comes next, patterns etc)

6.     Odd one out. You show few objects in a row and the child has to figure out which figure is the odd one out in that row

7.     Reading with dots: write few sentences on a sheet. Each line should have only one sentence. Put a green dot at the beginning and red dot at the end of each line. The child puts finger on the green dot, starts reading by finger guidance and stops when the finger reaches red.

8.     Text copying: write words in a column on a sheet. Ask the child to copy them. Progress to sentences, then paragraphs later. You may use dot method here also to indicate the beginning and end

9.     Object memory: a)you show few objects to the child. Mix them with more objects. He has to pick only those he has seen earlier b)you give an object in his hand. You mix it with other objects. You blindfold him and ask him to pick that object from the lot

10.                        Route memory: ask the child to describe you the route from one place to another, with the left/right turns, shops, landmarks, etc

11.                        Mapping: you ask the child to look around the room carefully. Blindfold him. Now ask him to describe the room again. You may do it for those rooms/shops also where he has gone frequently.

12.                        Word memory: you show a word to the child, remove the sheet, ask him to tell the word. It can be progressed to 5-6 words in a row/column. Same thing can be done with numbers (word span and number span)

13.                        Picture memory:a)you show a picture card with 4-5 objects drawn on it. You show another picture card with 4-5 more objects drawn on it. Child has to find out those he has seen earlier b) you show few pictures drawn in a row/column, keep the paper aside and ask the child to tell the pictures in the same order (picture span)

Note: This is not an exhaustive list or a diagnostic tool.