Learning To Read
Teaching our oldest child to read was a breeze. She pretty much taught herself. I quickly realized teaching our next child, who has a moderate hearing loss, would not be so easy. He learned his ABC’s easy enough but had trouble pronouncing the letters correctly. Games, songs, nothing worked. I was frustrated and unsure of what to do. After pondering a solution, I came up with the following.
First, I set him on up on our computer playing games that revolved around learning the alphabet, he preferred the Blue’s Clues ABC’s CD-Rom. I plugged in head phones to the computer and then put them on Brant. The headphones were the trick! They blocked everything out, all voices and background noise, making the sounds on the computer the ONLY thing he could hear. After months of trying everything I could think of to help him pronounce his ABC’s correctly, he had them down perfect. He was thrilled and so was I.
UPDATE: I recently came across a new version of the Blue’s Clues game I mention above. Our copy no longer worked with the newer versions of windows, so I have been unable to use it with our 4 year old daughter who is learning her ABC’s.
While shopping at Christian Book, I came across Adventure Workshop Toddler Edition which includes the Blue’s Clues ABC games. I was thrilled and ordered it! Bonus, it’s under $6 bucks!
After mastering the alphabet, the most difficult thing for Brant was learning to read. He really struggled with phonics, even simple words like cat and dog were too hard for him. He could pronounce the letters but when attempting to put sounds together, he just couldn’t do it.
I finally had an idea that has really worked for him.
- I purchased plain index cards and wrote down every word from one of his Phonics Practice Readers
onto the cards.
- I would then take 4 to 5 cards at a time and say each word to him.
- I would have him repeat each word until he had them memorized. We did this until he had memorized all of the words I had written down.
- We then “read” the book he had memorized words for.
After doing this for the first few books, he began to pronounce the words on his own. He was able to recognize that if the letters C-A-T next to each other sounded like the word CAT, then the letter C had a certain sound, the letter A had a certain sound, and so on. He was never able to grasp this concept using any of the “normal” phonics programs I tried.
My husband pointed out to me that this how all people read once they know how to. We never actually sound out words once we learn them, we simply have them memorized. So apparently I didn’t make some great discovery! But Brant can now read and that’s all I care about!
After he mastered the Phonics Practice Readers
UPDATE: Brant is now 9 years old and reads everything he finds! He still struggles with pronunciation and spelling of unfamiliar words, so we don’t focus so much on “testing” his spelling as we do with learning (memorizing) vocab words.
When Brant was evaluated by a speech therapist for our school district in California, she said he had the best speech she had ever heard from someone with his degree of hearing loss. She said she could tell I had worked with him and whatever I was doing, to keep doing it!
While this method may not work for every child, it helped Brant tremendously.
