The Top Ten Things you Should Know about Reading: http://www.readingrockets.org/article/42934/

Dyslexia

People are always asking the signs of dyslexia. Sally Shaywitz, M.D. and Professor of Pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine provides information on what to look for in her book Overcoming Dyslexia. Shaywitz (2005) says the earliest clues involve mostly spoken language. The first clue may be delayed language. Once the child begins to speak, look for the following problems:

• Trouble learning common nursery rhymes such as "Jack and Jill" and "Humpty Dumpty"
• A lack of appreciation of rhymes
• Mispronounced words; persistent baby talk
• Difficulty in learning (and remembering) names of letters
• Failure to know the letters in his own name

Kindergarten and First Grade:

• Failure to understand that words come apart (batboy - bat and boy)
• Inability to learn to associate letters with sounds, such as being unable to connect the letter b with the "b" sound
• Reading errors that show no connection to the sounds of the letters (big read as goat)
• The inability to read common one-syllable words or to sound out even the simplest of words, such as mat, cat, hop, nap
• Complaints about how hard reading is, or running and hiding when it is time to read
• A history of reading problems in parents or siblings (p. 122)

In addition to the problems of speaking and reading, you should be looking for these indications of strengths in higher-level thinking processes:

• Curiosity
• A great imagination
• The ability to figure things out
• Eager embrace of new ideas
• Getting the gist of things
• A good understanding of new concepts
• Surprising maturity
• A large vocabulary for the age group
• Enjoyment in solving puzzles
• Talent at building models
• Excellent comprehension of stories read or told to him. (p. 123)

This book is a great resource: Overcoming Dyslexia, Sally Shaywitz, 2005 Vintage Books

Fluency

One may wonder the benefit of reading passages over and over. The National Reading Panel emphasized the importance of fluency and how guided repeated oral reading can improve children's reading through fifth grade and may even prove helpful for some students in middle school and high school. Shaywitz (2005) shared, "reading a passage over and over while receiving feedback is a means of obtaining input to master a specific word (p. 232). The repeated reading builds a more accurate neural representation of that word within the brain (2005, Shaywitz, p. 232)

Reading Volume

Arlington (2009) purports "Struggling readers need to read a lot because it is during the actual reading that they can practice all those complicated strategies and skills" (p. 64). Torgeson & Hudson (2006) concur through their research it is not that teaching strategies and word recognition are not important but this will not necessarily guarantee a student will read better. These authors agree that "The only way to do this is to design interventions such that struggling readers engage in lots of text reading" (p. 64, 2009).

Early Reading Instruction

When is your child ready to learn letters? When a child can identify the beginning sound of an object, this is a cue that he is ready to learn letters. If a child can look at a picture of a dog and say the /d/ sound, he/she is then ready to begin learning the shapes of letters that go with the sound he/she hears. The letter now takes on meaning and is not just an abstract symbol

Importance of Phonemic Awareness

In the book Leaning to Read is Child's Play, (Maunz, Matthews, and Klein, 2001), the authors explain how as they worked with the children, they "began to understand the role the ear plays in reading. Not the role of hearing per se, but the ability of a child's brain to perceive the individual sounds of spoken language " p. 32). They discovered that for a child to learn to read, the child must go through a transformation period in which he "learns to focus on the sounds in words rather than their meaning" p. 32). This is why rhyming, blending and playing with sounds is so salient for a child in the early reading stage.

RHYMING

Rhyming is the ability to identify words that have identical ending sounds. Rhyming aids students in developing phonemic awareness which leads to decoding, teaches students to group words together by sounds, and teaches students to make connections that are used to spell words. What are some rhyming activities you can incorporate when helping your son/daughter?
1) Read stories that have rhyming words.
2) Give words with the pattern consonant-vowel-consonant words, such as, cat, hat, top. Tell your child two of these words rhyme but one does not rhyme. Then have your child tell you which one does not rhyme.
3) Select four pictures, one is used as the example. Have your child name each picture and then identify the picture that rhymes with the one you are using as an example.
4) You say a word and have your child come up with a word that rhymes.
5) Play a rhyming memory game.
6) Sing songs together that rhyme - Nursery rhymes certainly fit this category. After singing the song several times. Have the child pick out the rhyming words.

For more ideas check out the websites listed on the sidebar.