How To Avoid That My Child Struggles With Too Many Words In The Readers

When remediating struggling readers, think of handling a fine balance between Motivation on the one scale, and Accuracy on the other.

• When you demand perfect accuracy, progress will become so slow that you will most likely lose your child's intrinsic motivation to learn to read.
• When you are too lenient on accuracy and allow the child to progress too fast, you risk creating problems in the not so distant future, when your child needs to wrestle with too many words not properly mastered.

It is not necessary for the child to demonstrate perfect fluency when reaching the Reader. Please note that we provide the Timer on the Reader page ONLY to provide you with an indication of fluency. The timer is NOT a Fail/Pass tool. Remember: Each new word introduced in a new reader will still be reviewed during the next three lessons. The Reviews exercises review words all the way to three lessons/readers back. These Reviews, combined with the Print exercises, drive these words deeper and deeper into their Lexicon or Fast Route reading system.

Further, when a student reaches a new Reader, this reader should be printed and frequently re-read. It is in this supervised re-reading that individual words can be corrected (see here how: How to correct pronunciation with struggling readers). During this re-reading, the new words are encountered over and over again, and anchored or coupled in their Fast Route reading system with contextual, syntactical, and grammatical anchors - all of which help build fluent access to those words down the road.

Having said all this, it may still occur sometimes (recently with another student, named Ben), that they still struggle with some words. It is then a good idea to work with Word Walls (see here how: What are Word Walls (and how to use them) and to .e.g. produce little flash cards and interact with the child with these words throughout the day.