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Should every child read in their first year of school?  By Liana Chandler (Bach EC, M.T & M Ed Spec)

25/9/2014

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I am going to set out some realistic expectations for what children can achieve in reading and writing in their first year of school.

The Foundation year of school goes by different names across Australia.  It is Kindergarten in NSW/ACT, Prep in QLD/ VIC/TAS, Pre-primary in WA, Transition in NT and Reception in SA.  Whatever the name, it is an important year for the children, for their parents and for teachers.  Children and parents are nervous and excited about big school.  Increasingly, it seems, a lot is riding on this year and Foundation year teachers feel their responsibility heavily.  They know how important their work will be in giving children a positive attitude to school and learning.  They know how anxious parents are about their children's welfare.  And increasingly they feel a pressure from their schools to have children performing at a certain level by the end of the first year.

However, it is unrealistic to think that all 5 year olds will achieve the same benchmarks at the same time, and within the first year of school.  When it comes to reading and writing there will be a huge range of skills in the classroom.  Some children will finish the first year able to read simple books and make a good attempt at writing comprehensible sentences, and some children will only just have understood that those squiggly black lines on the paper say something.  Not only do they say something, they have to be organised in a particular way so that any person who looks at those squiggles can make sense of them.  We call that having a ‘concept of print', and it's a pretty abstract concept to get your head around so it's not surprising that it takes some 5 year olds a little bit of time.

We should expect that all children will finish their Foundation year with that concept of print.  Most importantly, all children should finish their Foundation year with a belief that they will be clever readers and writers.  Unfortunately, many children don't finish their first year at school with that self-belief. T oo many young children move into Year One already describing themselves as not good at reading and writing – and unfortunately it is their teachers and their parents who give them this message.

When children hear reading being talked about in numbers (e.g. go pick a book from the Level 2 box) then they equate being a reader with getting through levels of readers.  For them, being a good reader isn't about meaning or enjoyment or a fascination with learning new things from books; instead being a good reader means filling in all the spaces on your take-home reader sheet.  This is a message we give our children that is both wrong but also very damaging to the child's attitude to school and themselves as learners.

So, in the Foundation year of school we need to carefully reflect upon the messages we may unintentionally be giving our young children about who the good readers and writers are.  Too often, schools describe reading in terms of levels and set ‘level' targets for the end of the Foundation year, not on the basis of any research, but apparently on a stab in the dark whim or the declaration of a commercial publisher, Teachers assign children to groups on the basis of ‘levels', and children's reading material is determined by those ‘levels'. And then there are the parents waiting around for the pickup comparing their children's performance by discussing reading levels, or asking for a Level 16 book for their child because they are sure the Level 10 readers they are on are far too simple.  When did reading become about numbers and not about reading beautiful books?

Becoming a good reader starts with loving books and believing you will be a good reader.  Of course there is teaching involved as well, and it is complex and specific, and it is why our Foundation teachers need to be our best teachers. But it is very hard to teach a child to read if they already believe reading is something other kids are good at, not them.

Give children real books to read, there are plenty out there!  Talk to that endangered species – the children's librarian - at your school or at your local library and stock your homes and classrooms with children's literature.  There are many quality books with predictable and repetitive sentence structures that support young readers, whilst also telling entertaining and engaging stories, and that makes teaching young children to read a joy for everyone involved.

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Questions to Ask About Controversial Treatments for LD.  By Liana Chandler (Bach EC., M.T, M Ed Spec).

20/9/2014

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Some people will believe just about anything... and that’s not a criticism, it’s just human nature. And parents of children who struggle with learning are no exception. In fact, they are likely to be more vulnerable to believing what they hear about promising treatments for learning disabilities (LD) because of the enormous pressure they feel to make the right decisions about how best to help their children succeed. Making good decisions about trying (and often investing in) a particular therapy for your child starts with asking a few key questions about the therapy or approach being considered:

  • Does the approach sound familiar? Is it easy to understand and does it seem to make practical sense?

  • Do I believe what others tell me because they sound like they know more than I do?

  • Am I prone to try a particular treatment because the description includes scientific-sounding words, impressive looking charts and graphs, or pictures of the brain?

  • Am I not sure what I think but I feel that doing something is better than doing nothing?

  • Is making a decision to go with this treatment helping me stay calm and helping to manage my insecurities and emotions about what is best for my child?


    Reflecting on these questions is an important first step to helping make careful, informed decisions about whether a particular controversial, alternative or complementary therapy is worth introducing to your child. Before diving into the specific types of questions you should be asking yourself and others about a particular treatment, also consider that:


  • Good science is cumulative, meaning that even as a non-expert you should be able to discover lots of information from different sources about a particular treatment approach. Make it your business to understand what the “field” is saying about what works and what is not yet proven to be effective.

  • Just because it was published in a journal doesn’t mean that it is true, or that it will work for your child. Look for characteristics in the program materials or descriptions of the subjects in studies that evaluated effectiveness, and see whether they seem to match those of your child.

  • Trust your instincts. If it sounds too easy or too good to be true, it probably is!

    Asking Good Questions About LD Therapies and TreatmentsHere are some important questions to ask yourself and the treatment provider, and why they are important to ask:

    What is this therapy intended to do and how will I know it is working? If you don’t know what it is supposed to do, how will you know it was successful? Your child’s improvement might be attributable to the extra attention he is getting and have nothing to do with the therapy itself.


WHAT TO ASK

WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO ASK

Does this therapy work directly on an area of weakness or does it focus on other areas that will then have a positive impact on learning?

“Training the brain” is like saying “feeding the body” or “watering the plant.” Therapies that offer practice and focus on particular subsets of skills or cognitive abilities cannot promise that these experiences will result in better reading, spelling writing, etc.

How long (days, weeks, months, years) will my child have to be in treatment for it to work, how long is each session, and how will I know when to stop?

Some programs promise radical improvement in a short period of time while others are less specific about the length of time that a child is likely to need to engage in treatment before realizing results. Think about it this way: LD is lifelong, and while children can (and do) develop skills and become adept at using accommodation that help them work around their challenges, their LD does not go away. When will a treatment no longer provide real benefit? Who will make that decision? What criteria will the decision be based on (child is bored, cost is prohibitive, not enough time given other priorities)?

How much will this therapy cost?

Many (if not most) controversial therapies are not covered by insurance, nor are they funded or reimbursed through school districts. You would never buy a car or a house with an open-ended payment plan that had no terms and no end date. Be an informed consumer, know the ongoing costs of your investment, and like any good business, stay in tuned to your “return on investment,” knowing when to begin, intensify or pull back, and when to stop.

How does the premise of this therapy explain why my child has not made progress so far and why will this program, as compared to other more conventional approaches, have better results?

If the underlying description of the therapy sounds too good to be true, proceed with caution. It may be that certain targeted interventions can be introduced by the school or begun at home (at no cost). Look “inside the box” before expanding your search.

Has the effectiveness of this program been tested by independent scientists (including educators) who have no investment in this vs. another program that purports to accomplish the same results?

This is not easy for most parents to do. “Studies have shown…” doesn’t mean that the studies were done by disinterested parties, that a random sample of students was selected for these investigations, that reported progress was statistically significant, or that reported benefit was sustained over time. Look online for impartial opinions and ask qualified professionals for help figuring this out.

Are the claims made about this therapy “too good to be true?”

If the results are so powerful, why aren’t more parents, professionals and school systems using it? And why hasn’t the scientific community studied it and made public announcements about its efficacy?

Have other parents tried this approach and decided not to continue?

It is often hard to gather information about what did not work and why a particular intervention failed to deliver benefits as promised. But keep looking and asking. Testimonial success stories are great for business but not for science. Anecdotal information can lead scientists to ask different types of questions and test different hypotheses about what does and does not stand up to rigorous investigation. But if its scientific evidence you want, don’t look for it in feel-good stories and advertisements.

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Reading Comprehension: How Stories Help Students Learn New Information.  By Liana Chandler (Bach EC, M.T & M Ed Spec)

16/9/2014

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Reading comprehension for young students is extremely important.  Using stories to teach new information and revise misconceptions has proven very effective when we teach new information, but also when we aim to revise or change pre-existing incorrect information.  Stories have a familiar structure, especially for children, and it is pretty amazing how powerful they can be.  In the context of these stories, the new information is presented by story characters, engaging in relevant actions and reaching resolutions.  Let’s take for example the concept of gravity, a very difficult concept to teach in science.  If you open a science textbook, you will typically find the description of the ‘dropping balls’ example: You drop two balls of the same shape and size but different weights, and you predict which one will reach the ground first.  A common misconception held by children, but also by many adults, is that the heavier ball will hit the ground first.  Over the course of developing a narrative to address this pre-existing incorrect information, we will state the misconception as held by one of the story characters, and have another character, a science teacher or scientist for example, refute and explain it with a detailed explanation.  The more detailed the explanation, the more effective it is at changing students’ pre-existing incorrect beliefs.  It is very important to remember that the character refuting and explaining the misconception must have a certain degree of credibility.

 

Four Tips to Boost Reading Comprehension for Students

 

Read with a purpose.  Goal-oriented reading affects what learning processes will take place and how effective those processes will be.  Whenever we assign reading activities, especially for children, they need to be assigned with a purpose.  For example, reading to locate information, to summarize, to tell a friend, or to learn how to put together a toy are great ways to facilitate effective learning.  If you have a purpose, it influences how things come together and interconnect in your memory.

 

Choose the right texts.  It’s important to separate the texts we use for children learning to read and the texts we use for children reading to learn. When selecting a text for a child who is learning to read, we need to match his or her reading level so it’s not too difficult and not too easy.  Reading to learn, on the other hand, means we should also worry about whether the information to be learned is also age appropriate.

Think out loud.  Verbalizing your thoughts is a methodology we use in our Lab to understand the processes of reading.  It helps reading itself and influences learning in a positive way.  Take the lead on this by showing your child or student how you think through specific texts, one sentence at a time. Illustrating this process will help those students who have yet to figure out how reading unfolds explicitly.

 

Ask “why questions.”  Reading is a constructive process.  We interconnect information and ultimately form a mental picture about the text in our minds. Choose a pre-specified point, such as after every paragraph, to dig deeper and ask your students or children “why questions.”  This helps students make connections when those are needed and facilitates their comprehension and learning.

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    About ALA

    The Australian Literacy Academy (ALA) is a private English tutoring centre in Castle Hill, NSW dedicated to helping children of all levels and spectrums reach their full potential in the area of literacy: reading, writing, spelling, comprehension and speaking and listening.

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About Us
Australian Literacy Academy is a private English tutoring centre dedicated to helping children of all levels and spectrums reach their full potential in the area of literacy: reading, writing, spelling, comprehension and speaking and listening. We provide tutoring at our Castle Hill centre and online
tutoring to children of all ages across Australia.


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Australian Literacy Academy (ALA)
Private English Tutoring Castle Hill
Unit 12
7 Anella Avenue 
CASTLE HILL NSW 2154 


T:  (02) 9191 7336
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