Monday, February 9, 2009

I develop a top-down technique to learn to read

I've been reading at school often with my five year old, who started reading but seems to have dyslectic traits the same as his brother had: many aspects of reading are fine, but just a specific difficulty is there matching the sound to the image which causes him to slow down. I'm figuring out a way to read together at this moment and it's finally working well. I'm a little bit enthousiastic about it because it's a top-down approach and I might be getting a better result than the classical way. A special way of reading for early detected intelligent dyslectics. I'm thinking to write a longer article about it describing what I do. Maybe it will grow to be a top-down technique for reading. I couldn't find any material on top-down reading techniques, so if anyone has any kind of information please mail me at Odile AT schmiodile POINT NL. Thanks in advance.


samlcarr said...

Odile, I'd be fascinated to hear of your approach. My son only started to enjoy reading at the age of 16 after first seeing the Harry Potter movies and then us reading through the books together.

Odile S said...

Sam, thanks for dropping by. School wanted me to stop with my approach although it seemed to work. I think the teacher doesn't understand my son, now 6 years old. She keeps returning to the rules for measuring the level. This way of measuring is good for most students, but I don't think it's good for very intelligent dyslectic children. It keeps them practising at a low level of understanding. The result of this is that they lose their attention. The attention is kept by matching intelligence level to the content of the story used for practicing reading. If the story is too simple, the intelligent child cannot keep focus. If the technical reading level is high, an intelligent child is more challenged than if the level is low. Thus practice should start with difficult comprehension level AND difficult technical level (although not overdoing it). This is exactly the contrary than is necessary for ordinary children. This is why there are intelligent children who get problems with learning to read.



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