Reading Fluency

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Hello everyone. We recently had my son's IEP meeting and along with his social struggles, he is very low in reading fluency. I was looking for ideas to help me help him with this. So if any of you have had this same struggle and found something that really worked I would like to hear about it. Thanks!

My daughter is dx'd with AS as well as a learning disability in writing but that also manifests in some difficulty in reading. Her school has included her in their reading intervention programs since it is one of our districts academic focus' for all students. They happen to have alot available.

At home, we provide lots of books on the subjects she likes. At first, she would just scan the pictures, but as her interest grew, she challenged herself more and began reading on her own unprompted. she loves video games so we make sure she gets lots of role playing games - games that involve alot of reading in order to play them. The computer - same thing. Comtniually providing opportunity and assisting wherever we can. Even though she's going on 9 we still read to her as well. And, she will sit us down and read to us with the occassional helping hand.

If they have identified his reading difficulties in the IEP, the in school interventions should help. It took a good two years of additional help but my daughter has remained on or just slightly below grade level in her reading skills. The main thing is constant encouragement in the skills she does have and the ones she needs more confidence in - like sounding out words phonetically. Keep an eye out for all the issues that could possibly be effecting his reading skills - hearing, eyesight, comprehension, self esteem, sensroy issues - many things could be contributing to compound what may be a single issue and making it that much more challenging. It's all about removing those obstacles, providing constant positive support and working closely with the educational team to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Good luck mom!

My son was very resistant to reading until age 6/7, and the key for him was that he really wanted to play certain computer games (like Lego Universe, etc) but they all involved lots of reading. He couldn't understand the game if he couldn't read. So I basically tricked him into learning how to read. I got him the games he wanted, and at first I did the reading for him (always having him follow along so he was learning too) and eventually I told him he would need to do the reading himself. He did, because he saw the purpose in it. Is there something your daughter is really into, that would coax her into reading more?

At the same time, we did reading together every night where I read 2 pages, he read 1. First he would read a book that was at his level, then I would read a book to him that he was really interested in, usually a few levels higher than he was reading at. We also had him use a website called starfall.com which is an excellent reading website. Our kids also tend to get overwhelmed by the volume of words on a page, so choose books with larger pring and less text per page, lots of illustrations, and also look into getting special plastic strips which not only isolate one line of text at a time, but also come in different colours to minimize the stark black-on-white contrast of the lettering.

If you can just get her over that hump of resistance, you may find she really takes off. My son went from being barely grade level in Grade 1 to now reading at a Grade 8 level (he's in Grade 2).

jolly phonics worked well for us....there is a movement to go with each phonics sound. Having the movement built into the memory helped him be able to jog his memory when he forgot a sound.

I also wrote lots of "word family" stories on subjects he likes.

My son would watch tv and dvd's with the sub titles on. We also bought him leap pad.

He reads well above his age, however he would never read at his previous school, when I questioned him about not reading at school, his response was that he didn't like the atmosphere or the reading material.