READING HELP! SKIPPING WORDS, USING SMALLER TYPE, READING SILENTLY

Luca reads our “LOOK” book

Melissa, FB user and proud mom of Violette (8, with Down syndrome), shot me a few questions she thought might be “blog fodder.” She was right. She wrote, “We pulled out the flashlights from your reading bundles last night for the first time – they’re great! I’m sorry I haven’t been using them before now. Violette is getting to be a solid reader; she reads with expression and her comprehension skills are good. BUT…”

Q. “How can she graduate to smaller text sizes?”

This is a tricky question, for this reason: when we ask our learners to read a great deal of text in small type, we are often inviting brain fatigue, which can be an ongoing challenge throughout a learner’s life. There are happy exceptions, of course; but I’m speaking in general about our learners with Down syndrome.

Your daughter—already a solid reader—will be able to read tiny type eventually without a problem; but will she be able to easily soldier through dense pages of text in a novel? The likelihood is that visual/brain fatigue will set in before she’s very far at all into the text.

So I would suggest proceeding with caution as far as small type size coupled with longer text blocks. One without the other should not be a problem: either longer text blocks in large print, or smaller text blocks in small print. In other words, one challenge at a time: challenge the learner with either text length or text size, but not both at the same time, or we’re inviting fatigue.

I have seen this repeatedly with students: depending on the individual’s learning challenges, brain fatigue sets in either sooner or later. Offering visual breaks in the form of other activities helps; just relieving the intensity of concentration for a few minutes can re-start the learner energetically and give the brain a mini-recess.

Q. “She sometimes skips the small words – a, and, the, etc…Any advice for breaking that habit?”

I’m of two minds on this: the first is that our “key word speakers,” our kids with Down syndrome who sometimes skip all but the most important words–the key words–in speech, are skilled minimalists. The child knows Mom is jolly well going to understand him when he asks her at 5:00 p.m., “Daddy home?” Mom knows that junior is actually asking, “Mommy dearest, when will Daddy be home?” Like, why go to all that trouble?

With reading, they also have the higher sense that articles or other small words are, for the most part, dispensable. Why bother to read aloud words like “a, the, it, etc.?” Perfectly sensible people in other countries don’t use those words. Russian, for example: “What is problem?”

But since we don’t want our kids to get into the habit of selectively deleting words when they read aloud, we can use temporary techniques to help break the habit. Here are a few:

• Highlight “lost” words with a marker.
• Put a colored dot under those words in the text. Have the child use a pointer (unsharpened pencil, using the eraser end) and hit that dot as she’s reading along, pointing to each word in the sentence.
• Use a small blank card to cover the text that follows the words she tends to ignore; wait until she says the neglected word before pulling the card away to reveal the rest of the sentence.

Another important tip is this: while you are concentrating on making small type available in smaller text blocks, break it up with lots of visuals. This helps the child not only by increasing engagement, but it gives the child the visual message, “You can do this. See? There isn’t much type after all.” See examples:

Two examples from our printable First Grade book, “Where Do You Live?”

Q. When do you suggest working on reading silently?

I like one suggestion from Sue Buckley (Down Syndrome Education International). In one of her conferences here in Southern California, she suggested having the child read a sentence/section of text once or twice aloud, and then a third time silently. This is a good comprehension aid, since the third time removes all effort of articulation and enables the child to focus on the meaning of the sentence. So that would be a good way to begin.

If you offer her super-high-interest reading books and leave them where they’re accessible to her, you might be delightfully surprised to catch her reading silently on her own. Make the topics tempting! This is the most natural method and the easiest on the parent. I will never forget the day my 9-year-old son Jonathan (with Down syndrome) walked into the kitchen clutching one of his “body books” (kid books on anatomy) and talked enthusiastically about the “skeletal system” and the “digestive system.” Whoa. I had taught him to read at 5, but never taught him those particular words. But he daily spent lots of time poring over his several-hundred-book library, reading silently. If I had ever wondered if he were actually reading or just looking at the pictures, that was my answer.

Good luck to Melissa and each of you! And thumbs up to Violette, who is fast becoming a “solid reader”!