Part 3: Educational Learning Styles Vary per person
A one size fits all approach to reading probably doesn’t exist. While schools do what they can to increase reading scores through evidenced based practices, standardized testing and more individualized instruction when necessary, does it fix the challenges of all learners? Part 2 of this series introduced a few educational expectations of incoming first grade students both past and present. Additionally, some strategies to assist a child in gaining quality reading skills were given. To conclude this series, let’s consider learning styles and how to determine if a particular reading program is appropriate for your child.
Types of Learners
Personality differences, learning styles, and academic strengths/challenges all play a part in helping a child achieve success. You’ve most likely experienced this yourself and compared your journey to someone else’s. Children are often good at identifying what does or does not come easily to them. There is a necessary level of struggle needed to go through for growth, but of course we don’t want to inhibit that with tasks they are not ready for yet.
For reading instruction we have to meet the child where they are at. Notice how they respond to different methods of reading such as: face to face with a book, listening, playing with something in their hands when reading or even acting out what they are reading. Incorporating multiple senses into the instruction can make the words stick, and helps them understand the text and the process therefore making valuable life and brain connections.
Image by storyset on Freepik
Curriculum Focuses vs how your child learns how to read best
Multitudes of reading curriculums are circulating schools, all highlighting what makes their program special. In reality one program may work well for some students while a different program seems to reach another group. Many curriculums are rich in phonics instruction, teaching the myriad of rules to be able to spell and sound out words. Some children prefer the rules, memorizing those and applying them to words they are learning as well as practice with sight words. Another approach is focusing on the whole word and its meaning. Children who do well with this program have strong visual memory skills and remember how a word looks, therefore learning to spell based on memory and not so much from numerous rules. The goal with both styles is for your child to be able to read, spell, understand and write; whichever program you need to use to accomplish that is supremely determined by how they learn best.
One reading curriculum that touts making learning to read an enjoyable process is Happy Cheetah Reading. It stands apart from other programs with its emphasis on 3 simple things good readers do as the basis of their program: does it sound right, does it look right, does it make sense? The system doesn’t focus on rules, rather repeated exposure of being read to, reading aloud as well as some phonics and writing instruction mixed in all for just a 20 minute lesson each day. This is a system that seemingly works well with the visual system since our sense of sight is how we take in about 80% of all that we learn.
We teased how important visual skills are in Part 2 of this series, however lets dive a little deeper. Other than the ability for our eyes to focus on text near or far, we need our eyes to align properly so that we can see in single vision, keep the words in one place and get a sense of depth in our surroundings. Following a line of text smoothly and being able to jump to the next line is another necessary component. Another skill is to maintain visual memory of letters, words and the way they look. A big piece of comprehension comes into play when you can read something and see the story in your head.
If you feel that vision could be standing in between your child and reading success, reach out to us by phone 402-502-0043 or email us at [email protected] so we can determine how we can help.
