How to Make Reading a Success for Children

Reading comes easily to some children, but most struggle with some part of the complex process, such as recognising words, sounding out words with letters that have several pronunciations, memorising high- frequency words, reading orally with fluency and expressiveness, under- standing vocabulary, or comprehending stories. When your child is asked to face stressful reading challenges, he feels much like that little boy facing the daunting staircase. For some children, learning to read is so frustrating that they stop caring about books completely. The child who loved hearing you read bedtime stories over and over suddenly just gives up. If learning to read is this hard, why not just play a video game or watch television?

Learning to read should not be a discouraging, joyless struggle. You can observe your child as he tries to read, and see which skills are weak, where he struggles, and where he succeeds. Because you know your child’s learning-style strengths and what interests him, you can make reading a goal he can achieve with a positive attitude. You can select the strategies offered here that match your child’s specific challenges and learning styles, and by doing so, keep up his motivation. 

Why Reading Is a Challenge: It’s Unnatural

Reading is not a natural part of human development. Unlike spoken language, it does not follow from observation and imitation of other people. There are specific regions of the brain devoted to speech and processing oral communication, yet there is no specific center of the brain dedicated to reading. Instead, the complex task of reading requires that multiple areas of the brain work together through networks of neurons. This means there are many potential dysfunctions in structure and information transfer that can interfere with successful reading. For children to become joyful, successful readers, they need to develop the neural pathways that connect the parts of the brain that turn print into words, and words into thoughts and memories. Considering how inter- dependent and intricate these reading networks are, it is astonishing that anyone is able to read at all!

Learning to observe carefully is the first step toward building strong patterning skills in your young child.

OBSERVATION ACTIVITIES

Your child needs to be a good observer in order to recognise patterns. Try using the following games to build your young child’s observation skills:

• Play “colour detective”: As you drive together in the car, have your child say “red” each time he sees a red car. Then ask him to be on the lookout for another colour.

• Play “shape hunt”: Ask your child to lead you around the house and point to all things that are shaped like a circle (or square, etc).

• Place a few household objects on a tray and allow your child to examine them. Then ask him to close his eyes as you remove an object. When he opens his eyes, have him try to recall which object is missing. Gradually increase the number of objects on the tray as his skill improves.

• For a synnaps change of scene, spend some time with your child observing the details of a leaf. Encourage her to tell you all the things she notices about the leaf. Try this with other objects indoors as well as in nature. Natural-history museums with collections of rocks, butterflies, and bird eggs are great sources of objects that are similar but reveal differences upon closer observation.

• Read a very familiar story or poem aloud, and leave out a word or sentence. Make a game of asking your child to say “I noticed” when you leave something out. After a few tries, give him the opportunity to recall the missing words. You’ll be building his memory skills along with his auditory observation. 

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1. PATTERN IDENTIFICATION ACTIVITIES

   The brain recognises and stores information by seeking out familiar patterns. Learning takes place when your child’s brain recognises some- thing new as fitting into one of its stored patterns, and links the new sensory input with that memory circuit. Try the following activities to practice pattern identification with your child. 

Button-Matching Games

Take a large bag of assorted buttons (you can purchase these at most sewing stores for a few dollars) and make small groups of buttons that share simple characteristics, such as colour, shape, or number of holes.

VSK learners may find matching buttons elsewhere, such as on the shirts in his closet, which adds movement to the activity. Ask your child to look for a piece of clothing in his closet he believes has buttons that match the ones you gathered. For example, if you group together various two-hole buttons and he thinks he knows the pattern, he can look for shirts with two-hole buttons to show you. The movement will refresh his synapses.

Guess My Category

In this activity, your child decides the categories, sorts the figures, and has you guess the pattern of things taken from his collection of small toys, plastic animals, or toy vehicles.

What Belongs? What Doesn’t Belong?

To increase the challenge and build more connections to the way words and letters form patterns, group together three items with a shared characteristic and have your child describe what they have in common. 

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THE SCIENCE BEHIND BETTER LEARNING

THE KEY TO BUILDING BETTER BRAINS

Everything we learn comes to the brain through our senses. But the brain has built-in obstacles to sensory information input. It is an amazing organ, but it is not able to process the billions of bits of information that bombard it every second. To deal with the barrage, it is equipped with filters to protect itself from input overload and focus on the data most critical for survival.

How your child’s brain responds to environmental sensory data determines what information gets his attention. Only selected information passes through his lower brain filter (called the reticular activating system, or RAS) to enter his thinking brain.

 

RAD Learning

There are two essential brain processes and three main brain systems that are keys to building better brains. The processes are patterning and neuroplasticity. The three systems are what I refer to as RAD, which is short for:

R: Reticular activating system (RAS) A: Affective filter in the amygdala D: Dopamine

The Reticular Activating System (RAS)—The Brain’s Sensory Switchboard
The RAS is the attention-activation switching system located at the lower back of the brain (brain stem). It receives input from the nerves that converge into the spinal cord from nerve endings in the arms, legs, trunk, neck, face, and internal organs. The RAS sets the state of arousal and vigilance of the rest of the brain. It is the RAS that selectively alerts brains to changes in their environment that impact their survival— sounds, sights, and smells that may indicate danger or signal opportuni- ties to find food, mates, or shelter.

The Amygdala—Where Heart Meets Mind

The sensory information that children receive—the things they see, hear, feel, smell, or touch—stimulates the intake centers of their brains beyond the RAS.

The areas most active when new information first enters the brain are the sensory cortex areas in each lobe of the brain. Each of these regions is specialized to analyze data from just one sense (hearing, touch, taste, vision, and smell). This input is identified and classified by matching it with previously stored similar data. The sight of a lemon, for example, connects with the visual cortex in the occipital lobes. The feel of the lemon is recognized by the somatosensory (touch) centers in the parietal lobes. This sensory data must then pass through the brain’s emotional core, the limbic system, especially the amygdala and hippocampus, where emotional significance is linked to information (sour taste is yummy in lemon sherbet but yucky in unsweetened lemon juice). On receiving sensory data, these emotional filters evaluate its pleasure value. That decision determines if the information is given further access to the higher brain, and if so, where the data will go.

Dopamine—Working to Prime Your Child’s Brain

Dopamine is one of the brain’s most important neurotransmitters. (Some of the other neurotransmitters in the brain include serotonin, tryptophan, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine.) These neurotransmitters are brain chemicals that carry information across the spaces (synapses) that form when one nerve ending connects with another. During the last trimester of fetal development, the brain creates thirty thousand synapses per second for every square centimeter of cortical surface.

The brain releases dopamine when an experience is pleasurable. As a pleasure-seeking organ, the brain also releases dopamine in expectation of rewarding, pleasurable experiences. This has several advantages. Dopamine release increases attentive focus and memory formation. When dopamine is released during enjoyable learning activities, it actually increases children’s capacities to control attention and store long- term memories.

HOW THE BRAIN BUILDS MEMORY

When your child’s brain turns sensory input into memory, she learns. The construction of new memories allows her brain to learn by experience and predict the outcome of her behaviour. Memory is a survival requirement for animals that must learn, store, and recall how they should respond to physical needs and changes in their environment. They reactivate stored memories to recall and predict. Where did they go to find food? What places were dangerous because of predators? Where was the safe cave that provided shelter?

Each time your child remembers something, he is also reactivating a neural network that his brain previously created. When he adds new memories related to information already in brain storage, the neural circuit for that pattern or category of knowledge grows larger as more connections form between nerve cells. In essence, the more information stored in the brain’s networks, the more successfully we respond to our environments. The more we learn, the more information stored in our neural networks, the more likely our brains are to relate to new information—hence, learning promotes learning. 

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