Help for Struggling Readers

Many students struggle with the cognitive skills needed to be good readers.  With weak abilities in the areas of visualization, tracking, visual processing, auditory processing and/or memory, the practice of reading can soon become, frustrating, tiresome and laborious.  When kids pair negative associations and feelings with books, they may avoid picking up a book altogether.   For the same reason that you would not build a sky scraper on a weak foundation, for these kids, it is important to strengthen the individual areas of cognition first.   Many of these skills can be developed through game like activities that kids enjoy.    Here are a few ideas that you might like to try:

1)        When reading to your children have fun sharing your visualizations with one another by imagining what the settings and characters look like.  You can even encourage your children to come up with their own illustrations for stories.   

2)        Pull out a newspaper and encourage your child to find a specific word, such as the word the, on the page.  Encourage them to follow the words from left to right so that they are strengthening their tracking skills.  They can use their finger, a thin strip of paper or even a highlighter to keep their place.

3)        Play games such as the memory game - where students flip cards to find pairs, or get a free app like the old game Simon which strengthens visual and auditory memory.

In addition, I also offer four publications that might be helpful.  I have two visualization training PowerPoints, and I also have two workbooks titled Reversing Reversals and Reversing Reversals 2 that work on these foundational skills.  Click on the images below to learn more and download a free image of the 10 visualization skills as well as free samplings of both of my workbooks. 

Cheers, Erica