Helping your struggling reader

When I began teaching reading for the first time, I had thought that we would introduce and practice a letter sound 20-30 times, and my budding reader would have it down. Wrong! Instead, it was more like 2 or 3 hundred times! I had no idea it would be like that.

When you are going over anything that many times, you need a little variety. We played many games and worked with those pesky letter sounds in as many ways as I could think of. Remember at this point, you don't care if the student knows the letter names, you are after the child knowing letter sounds. Here are a few games you can try:

Make a list of letters, only say, 6-8. A mix of letters the child knows well with only a few that are newer to him. Using that list, dictate those sounds and have the child write them down. Let him compare your list to his, "reading" the sounds to you. Then the real fun, let him take your list and dictate those sounds to you. Again, let him compare your original list to your dictated copy. My kids loved the whole idea of "testing" me to see if I knew my letter sounds.

With this and other games, the best strategy is using a few at a time and a mix of known and new letters.

We wrote letters on index cards and used those to spell short words and practice reading them, cat, hat, pen, can, etc. (You could use Scrabble tiles to do this too.)

You can use those same cards to play a concentration game. You'll need 2 cards of each letter. Mix them up, lay them face down and let the child work on finding the matches. When he has matched all of them (remember, only 6-8 at a time, not all 26 letters!), let him read the sounds of all the pairs to you.

We enjoyed the Sonlight Language Arts games, Go A to Z and Alphabet Sounds Bingo.

A favorite game is a wonderful whole body reinforcement of letter sounds, but it does get wild and silly. I wrote a single letter on each piece of paper. Lay out 9-12 papers with different letters on the floor. Call out a letter sound and let the child jump onto the page with that letter. This is great for kinesthetic learners especially, but all of my children enjoyed it. Those papers will slide on the floor and between jumping, falling, and giggling, it does get pretty loud!

Encourage even older struggling readers to play these games. An older student can play them with a younger student as your "teacher's aide". It's learning for the younger child and review for the older one.

It takes a lot of work to become fluent with reading. Variety will help relieve the monotony of practicing the same thing over and over.

Now, go play a game!