When Reading Doesn’t Evolve in Your Child the Way It Should [Show]

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Gretchen Roe: 00:00:05.043
Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show, and I am most delighted to welcome two of my esteemed colleagues today to talk about what happens when your child does not emerge as a reader. This is a subject that is near and dear to all three of us. We’ve all been in that situation. We’ve done some serious research for you in this conversation. And I want you to know this will indeed be like drinking from a fire hose. When you receive this recorded webinar, I want to encourage you to go back through it and take some notes. The show notes will be extensive. Please make sure that you go to demmelearning.com/blog to access the show notes because they’re going to be really helpful to you. We have lots and lots of things to talk about today, and I’m going to begin with my colleagues and allow them to introduce themselves. We’ll play alphabet today. So Kathleen, I’ll let you go first.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:01:05.561
Hi, I’m Kathleen Calabrese. I work in customer service at Demme Learning. I homeschooled my two boys for 21 years. They both have since graduated and I had one who read easily and another one who was a struggling reader.

Amanda Capps: 00:01:22.091
And I’m Amanda Capps. I’m coming to you from Northwest Arkansas. I am the homeschool mom of eight. I have graduated my oldest. I have a senior this year and six more coming up behind her. And yes, vision issues, reading problems have been a big part of our journey.

Gretchen Roe: 00:01:45.005
And my name is Gretchen Roe. I’m coming to you from Western North Carolina. I have graduated all of my children now. That sounds so weird to say. I’m six months past that last graduation and I’m still not used to it. But two of my children had reading struggles and much of the information we are going to share with you today is what we have learned in the School of Hard Knocks. If experience– if wisdom is someone else’s experience, then we hope that we impart wisdom to you today. We really want you to understand this webinar. And I’m going to tee this up a little bit by saying we are going to have a follow up webinar to this in March. It’s going to be with Dr. Karen Holinga. Dr. Holinga is a PhD reading specialist from Ohio who also happens to be the developer of our Spelling You See program. And she’s going to dig even deeper into this subject. So consider this one half of a bookend of information for you as we get started. Ladies, I want to start with talking about what are the things we need to look for in reading readiness. And I’m going to ask both of you. So I’m going to let Kathleen start with some of those things that we’re looking for. And then Amanda, if you would pick up the slack and sort of back clean up for Kathleen, you’ll get to reverse the roles again in a little while. So Kathleen, what are the kinds of things we should look for in a student with regard to being ready to learn to read?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:03:24.404
Okay, so some of them are, can they play a board game like Candy Land or Chicka Chicka Boom Boom? Do they have an attention span of at least 10 minutes where they could do focus play on a puzzle, coloring, something like that? And then picture books. Do they enjoy and understand picture books? Are they willing to sit and listen to them and learn the story? Do they ask for the same books to be told over and over again? And then another one is, are they familiar with rhyme? Rhyme is an essential component of language and reading. So things like Hey Diddle Diddle and lines like that are helpful to then build the steps to help the child to learn to read.

Gretchen Roe: 00:04:10.077
In this day and age, I think we’ve kicked Mother Goose to the curb and we’ve done our kids a tremendous disservice. What we don’t understand is neurologically, rhyme starts to order the brain. And it gives us an enormous amount of word play in a small space of words, and it gives them vocabulary they might not be exposed to otherwise. At the outset, we want you to understand that if you are trying to encourage your child to read and you’re not reading to your child, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Reading to your child is essential. And depending on whose study you read and what Dr. Holinga says, you have to read somewhere close to 20,000 words to your student before your student is ready to read on their own. Amanda, I know that you have some other things that you can share with our families. What other things are we looking for for reading readiness?

Amanda Capps: 00:05:08.421
So things like engaging in imaginative and pretend play, being able to– we’ve all had the kids that put together little plays or productions that they want us to watch. Those types of things of being able to follow a storyline and things like that. They need to be able to respond and follow simple directions. Bring me your jacket. Put your socks on. Your shoes are on the wrong feet. Can identify an object based on a line drawing, like an elephant for coloring. Uses supplies gently, how they’re holding their pencil.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:49.856
They’re still holding it like they’re choking the life out of it. They’re not ready for reading.

Amanda Capps: 00:05:56.561
No. Can they narrate back? Can they retell a story? So if I have read something to my child during the day, when we’re sitting around the dinner table at night and we’re talking to dad about what we’ve done or what we’ve accomplished, are they able to articulate back the premise, the plot of the story, or remember character names and things like that. Can they catch a ball? Can they do a sit-up? What is their coordination like? Those are some big ones.

Gretchen Roe: 00:06:27.867
And often parents will say, when I say this at homeschool conferences or when I say this from stage and I mention, can you catch a ball? Can they do a sit-up? Parents look at me like, how does that involve reading? And the truth of the matter is if your student has weak core strength, they are going to struggle to learn to read. If you want to know a little bit more about that, how it affects handwriting, you can refer to another webinar, which is in our series, which was done early in October where I met with a occupational therapist talking about handwriting and its emergence. And I think it makes a tremendous amount of difference as parents. We don’t realize the kinds of eye-hand coordination that are necessary. And unfortunately, while these things have improved our lives enormously, they have also done a disservice to our children. And the reason that I say that, what I’m holding up for those of you who are listening to this is I’m holding up my cell phone. And when we put a student on a cell phone, particularly a very young student, what happens is there’s central detail vision development, but there’s not peripheral vision development. And because of that, it can affect their ability to emerge as readers. Now, we’re not here to tell you all take your kids off of all devices because none of us would have survived taking our kids off of devices. But we do want you to mitigate that with play that involves things like climbing and spinning and being able to know where their body is in space. We actually have a tremendous blog that was written by the founder of our company, Ethan Demme, and it talks about when children engage in dangerous play. And I know it’s going to stop the hearts of some of you very protective moms, but it really does serve a tremendous purpose. Kathleen, I want to come back to you now and talk about sitting with a student and when Michael wasn’t ready. I mean, your eldest son emerged as a reader like shot out of a gate and then Michael wasn’t ready. So can you talk about the differences there? Because sometimes that can be absolutely overwhelming to a parent.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:09:04.917
Sure. And I didn’t even know what the issue was. My oldest read quickly. I thought, okay, put the reading program on the shelf, pulled it out. My kids are seven and a half years apart so I had a gap, but I pulled it back out and thought he would learn to read the same way and he just didn’t. And it’s not that he couldn’t sound out words or he was having that kind of– he just didn’t read fluently. It just there was nothing fluent. It just never got there. I tried many different reading curriculums because I kept thinking, “Okay, maybe it’s just the curriculum. It’s not the right fit for him.” And every time I talk to season homeschoolers, they told me, “Maybe he’s just not ready. Some kids just aren’t ready. Maybe he’s just not–”

Gretchen Roe: 00:09:48.932
And how old was he when you started to try and teach him to read, if I may ask?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:09:54.129
He was probably five and a half. I even waited with him because he was such a a different child who didn’t sit still and moved about a lot. I didn’t jump right into kindergarten with him. I even waited for that. But he was probably about five and a half and then he– again, I tried every reading curriculum I could find but people kept telling me, “He’s probably just not ready.” So I just continued to read to him. I just kept reading and reading and reading. And then I still remember the day we were in the car and he started reading billboards and he was reading the signs on buildings and street signs and I’m sitting there thinking, “Wait. How did this happen? How is he just reading things?” I mean, he was reading full sentences off of billboards and and I thought, “Oh my goodness, this child knows how to read.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:45.308
And how old was he then?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:10:47.610
He was eight.

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:48.578
Eight.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:10:49.517
Yep.

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:50.177
The reason I want Kathleen’s story to relate to the rest of you who are listening today and listening to this podcast is she started at five and a half, but she knew she had a very active young man. And you know what? Until you can get, like Amanda said, that 10 minutes of attention, you’re playing what we call in our family a zero sum game. It’s not going to happen. And being able to recognize that input, Kathleen continued input with him. It’s enormously valuable. Now, I want to turn my attention to Amanda and I want to talk about Eva and Cassie because two really different kids with two wildly different issues. And they’re not your oldest children even.

Amanda Capps: 00:11:44.007
They’re not. Okay. So Cassie is my oldest and then Eva is kiddo number three. But I do want to back up even farther than that. So my introduction to learning challenges and learning difficulties, I’m a second-generation homeschooler, so I I was homeschooled all the way through. I’m the oldest of five kids. I was that precocious four-year-old. We all remember the Disney stories and it was read to you on your little tape player and it binged and you turned to the page, and so I just associated seeing the word with what I was hearing, and my mom was like, “I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t even have to lift a finger. You just started reading fluently.” But I was also a kid that really noticed patterns. I always did. They always stood out to me. Not every kid is going to do that naturally, so that’s something you need to be watching for upfront. So my sister had significant visual and auditory processing issues.

Gretchen Roe: 00:12:48.806
And Amanda, can I ask a question? Where is she in birth order?

Amanda Capps: 00:12:52.327
So she’s the one right after me.

Gretchen Roe: 00:12:54.124
Okay.

Amanda Capps: 00:12:54.703
And then the next one in line was a brother. Again, literally taught himself to read. Very naturally good student. Then we had Steven, who was diagnosed ADD and was an incredibly slow reader. We called him the pokey little puppy because he just–you could not get a fire under this kid [laughter]. You just couldn’t. He was so lackadaisical and that progressed into his reading speed and his comprehension. We found out working memory was a huge issue for him. He was literally, in the 0th percentile when we had him assessed. So if you’re trying to teach a kid who has no working memory, that can create a laundry list of issues. So then fast forward, I’m married. I start my family. Cassie was probably about six. She was already reading, so again, a precocious reader kind of figured it out on her own. I really didn’t have to do much. But what I noticed with her was what in the world is going on with your writing? I noticed when she would write, there were weird gaps between every letter, almost like she was starting a new word every single time and so it was very difficult to read. Her handwriting was atrocious. I could really tell that somehow, her control was not great. She had an awkward hold on her writing utensil the majority of the time. So anyway, we immediately had her assessed. She went through vision therapy. She also got corrective lenses that she wore– again, just because your child gets diagnosed with something visual going on and they get glasses does not mean that they wear them forever or that they’re always going to have to wear them because again, this was something she outgrew. And so she had specifically tracking and convergence issues, but they were not affecting her reading. It was just affecting her perception as she wrote in her writing. Eva was a whole another ball game. Eva, because I was aware of issues and I knew the hereditary nature of them, I was watching other kids emerge and keeping a real close eye on things. She was presenting much more like her dad and he is actually diagnosed dyslexic. And I couldn’t get her to look at the page. We spent almost two years just trying to consistently recognize letters, and I was so frustrated and so was she, and I just couldn’t understand. And some of the other things that later clued me in was she would get horribly car sick. So did Cassie. There were just a lot of things that kind of tipped me off that she was not seeing things well. She was not focusing and things like that. And so she has actually gone through two rounds of vision therapy and is now a fluent reader, and we’ve done a lot of hard work to get there.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:05.456
And so I want to recap a little bit. With the story Amanda has told you, what are the things as a parent that you need to pay attention to? First of all, she talked about weird handwriting, either incredibly messy or unnaturally spaced, as Amanda described it, if you have a child whose writing doesn’t stay on the lines no matter how visible you make the lines for them. She also mentioned a child who did not want to look at the page. I will ask you all as an adult, if there’s something that you know that’s going to make you sick, for instance, reading in a car, are you going to do it? Not a bit. These are all symptoms of what is known as a binocular vision dysfunction. In other words, do your eyes team, T-E-A-M, together the way they’re supposed to. And if they do not, it looks just like dyslexia. It smells just like dyslexia, but it has an organic cause and a resolution. So in our show notes– again, you guys are going to hear me say this five or six times. In our show notes this week will be resources for you all to determine if that is a mitigating factor. One of the parents who registered for the webinar said, “At what point do I seek diagnostics for dyslexia?” And we would all tell you after you rule out an eye teaming issue. That comes first because all the dyslexia interventions on the planet won’t resolve that organic issue until you can get it straight. Now, let me tell you a characteristic that Amanda did not mention, but I find it to be huge. And that is if you have a child with a hair-trigger temper, so you have a child who sits down and is amenable to school and then all of a sudden it’s a nuclear explosion and you don’t know what happened, I would– I don’t bet. But if I were a betting woman, I would take that bet that your child has a binocular vision dysfunction. So we would encourage you to reach out to that. Kathleen, can you talk a little bit about– you had mentioned the other day about body doubling and cloze reading, C-L-O-Z-E, cloze reading. And I think this is really important. And we’ll have some references in the show notes about it. But can you explain how that helps a reader emerge?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:18:53.489
Sure. So as I said, I was trying curriculums with Michael, and then I did get to a point where I just put everything away and said, “Okay. He’s not ready. I’m not going to worry about doing a reading curriculum.” However, I still wanted to make sure that I was doing things to eventually get there. So one of the things that I use mostly because he loved it was the cloze reading. And the close reading is when words are deleted from a passage, but words that would make sense. “The farmer used a blank to plow the field,” something like that. And obviously, it’s tractor. So he liked those kinds of activities. The good thing is where he was where he didn’t feel like a strong reader, so he wasn’t really willing to read. Those close activities work because I knew comprehension-wise that he was understanding the story. He was able to fill in those missing words, but I couldn’t get him to then read the sentence back to me. So we were still working on reading without using a reading curriculum, per se. So we were still doing it. And again, once I identified that he liked that activity, then I just continued on with it. In the beginning, he used little pictures, where I had something, where he put the picture of the word in there, but then, eventually, went to the actual word. And either he wrote it in, or I wrote it in. But then we would do the body doubling, where then I would be sitting next to him and reading next to him, making sure that I was using my finger and going word by word as I was reading so that he was hearing what I was reading while I was pointing to the words, right?

Gretchen Roe: 00:20:44.654
So can you review for our parents what does that exactly mean? As far as body doubling is, you’re sitting next to him as he reads and pointing to each word. Or how did you all do that?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:21:02.387
That is how I did it. If we were at the table, I made sure that I was sitting on the right of him. If we had a passage that– again, for a while there, he wasn’t a willing reader because he didn’t feel like he could do it. So even when I would say to him, when I tried to do the share reading, “You read a few sentences. I’ll read a few.” He was resistant to it. So, in the beginning, I just went along and pointed to each word. And I just read each word. And then, eventually, we did get to the point where I could say, “Okay. I’m going to read two sentences. And then you’re going to read one sentence.” And I did that. And then I was able to even– we would go and sit on the couch. And if we had our chapter books, where I would read a few pages, and then, I’d say, “Okay. You’re going to read this one part,” and just give him one sentence at a time, just something that I thought was manageable and then really congratulate him on it because just to kind of to build that in him that, “You can read. We’re working on it. And you can read. Look, you can do it.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:22:08.050
And Amanda, you have used body doubling with an older student who’s still not a fully emerged reader. So can you tell us how that works in your household because this is something parents of older children could employ?

Amanda Capps: 00:22:22.687
Yes. So first of all, not every student is wired to work independently. In the neurodivergent field, there is a concept called body doubling. And it is used very successfully by people who struggle with ADD or ADHD to keep them focused and to keep them on task. And all it means is you’re working in a space or an environment where there’s somebody working with you. They don’t necessarily have to be doing the same thing with you. They don’t necessarily have to be giving you input or anything like that. But it’s literally just the fact that their physical presence and that they are working and that you have that awareness that they are there with you that helps, and you’re seeing them be on task and stay focused and do their work, you can then do the same. It’s a lot like modeling. We do that a lot with little kids. And we think of it in terms of little kids who need a lot of support. Or you we’re walking them through processes and step-by-step things. But it can also be incredibly successful for older students if you find yourself in that situation where you just have that kid that’s struggling to get going or stay motivated or stay on task.

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:46.352
And I think one of the things that’s really important here is this is not predicated on age. This is predicated on capacity. And I often tell this story. My eldest son was brilliant. He taught himself to read at the age of four because he was impatient with me getting it together to teach him to read. And he was reading the Chronicles of Narnia as a kindergartner. But he couldn’t be left alone to do a single math problem until he was 17 years old. So in that instance, when some sort of academic enterprise is stressful, body doubling can be a huge benefit to us to help our children stay on task. And it’s ever harder in this day and age because as parents, we have more and more things that call for our attention. So we have to be intentional in order that our children can be intentional. And I think that makes a tremendous amount of difference. Amanda, can you talk a little bit about your recent experience with Dr. Holinga and the fact that you weren’t seeing Christopher progress and the things that she told you that are necessary for that progression?

Amanda Capps: 00:25:02.213
So that was actually Cooper.

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:04.064
Chris Cooper, I’m sorry. Yep, never mind.

Amanda Capps: 00:25:06.278
No, you’re fine. Christopher is actually–

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:08.031
Too many children, too many children.

Amanda Capps: 00:25:09.568
I know, right? I have a hard time keeping them straight too. So Christopher actually is my most recent vision anomaly. He is our first kiddo with double vision. So I was starting to begin to teach him how to read and noticed he was really struggling and he had that temper thing going on. Like he would sit down and have a good attitude and then it would get hard and he would get frustrated very quickly and he would kind of blow up and I would be like, what is going on? So took him in to our vision therapy provider and just said, hey, I just want to rule this out because something’s going on, but I’m not sure what it is. And he would get really close to the paper and he would fatigue very quickly. And she said, oh my word, he is absolutely 100% seeing double. And he goes, see mom, I told you I had twice as many vegetables as everybody else on my plate. And I was like, I never put it together. But he was making little comments. And I thought he was just being precocious because he’s just that type of a child. And he never wants to eat vegetables. So I was like, really, what are you doing? Anyway, but then with Cooper, so he is actually 12 right now. And after the second round of vision therapy, Eva got very fluent, and things just got wonderful. But this was after a second round of vision therapy after puberty. So I’m just telling you guys, sometimes this is a marathon, not a sprint. So be prepared and don’t flip out on yourself or your kids if this takes a while to emerge. This can be a real process and just consistency and encouragement can go a long way and patience, lots and lots and lots of patience. So with Cooper, I was just noticing that he was just still really struggling to blend. He was reading avoidant. It was just like pulling teeth to try to get him to even sit down with me and do anything that involved reading. It didn’t matter what the content was. I mean, I was trying to get him books that I thought, oh, well, he’ll like this or he’ll like that. No, he just wasn’t. And so I was very concerned. I reached out to Gretchen, who put me in touch with Dr. Holinga. And I sat with her for an hour and had my mind literally blown. I learned so much about what the brain is doing and how it is processing information. And it takes a child reading 20,000 words at that grade level before they can jump to the next. And so we just hadn’t put in the words. And so

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:01.385
going to stop you there for a second because this is important for parents to remember. Amanda just said 20,000 words at a grade level before your child can progress to the next grade level. Please continue.

Amanda Capps: 00:28:18.685
Oh, we had a hard conversation, and I just said, “Bud, look, these books–” because she determined his phonics were perfect. Didn’t need to be hammering away. Because I kept thinking, “Well, he’s not blending, so we need to keep doing phonics.” She’s like, no, you’re beating a dead horse. Don’t keep him there. It’s just going to continually frustrate him, not to mention he’s at a reading level where phonics don’t– phonics gets a student started. It’s the launching point. But then once you hit about the third grade level, which is where we see dyslexics start to fall off the bandwagon, they start to really struggle. It’s because now words are not phonetic anymore. We have words that don’t follow the rules and that are not able to be sounded out, and so they have to develop a visual reading memory and be able to just visually recognize these words. And if you’ve got vision things going on, you can see, you can absolutely see where the disconnect can happen and how it can just kind of fall apart. So this is where as a parent knowing, okay, we have– and so then he had a number. So now he has a goal. He knows what he has to do. He knows where he has to get. And Karen walked me through some very specific things. Good readers read the sentence. If they bobble on a word or they mispronounce something, they’re going to stop and they’re going to start the sentence over again and they’re going to read it again with the word in place and have correct– so at this grade level, context is everything. It’s the context that helps you read the words. It’s not the phonics. It’s not the sounding the words out anymore.

Amanda Capps: 00:30:06.618
And so that was a huge shift for us. He was depressed and upset for about a day when we had this conversation and he realized what this meant and what we were going to have to do, and then he pulled himself up by his bootstraps and we have been plugging away. He is keeping track of every single word he’s counting because that matters to him, and he wants to know when he hits the goal, there will be a reward when the goal is hit. I feel like incentivizing kids and rewarding them for hard work because this is very hard work for him is absolutely acceptable, and so that is our new method for– so I sit next to him. He’s reading. As he’s reading, if he misses a word or struggles or stumbles, we go back to the start of the sentence and we start the sentence over again. 98% of the time he reads the correct word every single time the second time through with no [crosstalk].

Gretchen Roe: 00:31:04.135
I think one of the things that’s important here to understand is you note Amanda is body doubling him. You note that he was feeling poorly about himself, so he didn’t want to read. And sometimes as parents, we don’t want to be the bad guys, so we think, “Oh, my son, my daughter, they’re struggling with reading. I’m not going to make them read.” I’m here to tell you, you got to do it. This is this is the place where, just like Mary Poppins, you have to take your medicine, and you have to be willing to do the hard work and put in the time. There are 220 Dolch words. Those are the words like “the”, and those words aren’t phonetic. 47% of those words, nearly half of them, aren’t pronounced phonetically. So it’s up to us to recognize– and I had a conversation with a parent a couple of weeks ago whose son was not an emerged reader, giving her a bunch of pushback, and God bless her, she is a wonderful mom who didn’t want conflict, and so she wasn’t pushing back on him. And she said, “Something’s really wrong. He’s still, at almost 10 years old, sounding out ‘the’.” You can sound out “the”. That’s not the way it works. So if you all are seeing yourself in the stories that we’re telling, we want to encourage you to move forward in helping them read by being persistent and consistent. And toward that end, Kathleen, you mentioned consistency when we sat down to plan for this a couple of weeks ago. Can you talk a little bit about how you found that consistency was tremendously helpful as Michael emerged as a reader?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:33:13.460
Well, I think it’s, like you said, that I realized that I couldn’t just– OK, he was struggling with reading. Even though I say, well, I put the curriculum aside, but I couldn’t just stop teaching him to read. I couldn’t just stop the process, so I continued reading to him every day. I mean, I had been reading to him since birth, so I continued reading to him. I made sure that he kept hearing the written word. And then I think the biggest thing with him was I had to figure out what were the things that worked with him. Again, the close reading worked with him. There was a certain comic book that he liked. I would read from that because I was able to then get him to maybe read a little bit along with me. That was something that he enjoyed because the pictures were there, so he liked it. So it was finding the things that he liked, and without saying we’re using a reading curriculum, I still was working on reading with him. I didn’t stop that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:34:17.377
Right. I think that’s one of the things that’s really important as parents. Sometimes, we are hesitant to know where the line is as far as are we pushing too hard? Are we asking too much? And kids are resilient, and they also know how to push your buttons. Let’s face it: nobody pushes your buttons as adeptly as your children do. [laughter] So we want to encourage you that this is a fight worth fighting and to hang in there before we move into the questions, because, man, we had a wealth of really terrific questions. Amanda and Kathleen, I have one more question for each of you, and Amanda, I want you to talk a little bit about processing speed. You had said, “Do they do anything in three seconds?” Let’s talk about processing speed a little bit and how that affects reading.

Amanda Capps: 00:35:10.428
Absolutely. So individuals have different processors. So some people’s brains process really fast, and they’re going to just blurt out, and it’s right there on the tip of their tongue, and they’ve just got it. Other kids are just not going to process that quickly, and I find myself– this is something that just baffles me to this day, but it’s like, my husband will ask me a question, and if I don’t immediately respond to him, he’s like, “Oh, well, we’re just going to not talk, I guess,” and I’m like, “I haven’t even had time to take that in, think about it, and then formulate my answers.” So I am actually a bit of a slower processor, and I have recognized that about myself. Some of my kids are super-fast and some of my kids are wired like me. And I tell them all the time, I’m like, “It’s not that I’m ignoring you or that I’m not answering you. I just need a little– I just need a minute to think about it. I need to think and figure out what it is I’m even feeling and what I want to do about what you asked me before I can formulate an answer.” And that doesn’t make me wrong or slow or anything like that. It’s just the way I process. And so same thing with kiddos, you’ll find that kid that it’s like, yep, they’re just firing away, and they are just, they’re on it. And then other kids, it’s like, you’re going to say, “Well, how are you today, sweetie?” And she’s going to look at you like a deer in the headlights. And she’s going to look down at her toes, and she’s going to dig her toe in the dirt a little minute, and she’s going to look up, and then she’s going to tell you. And that’s a slower processor. They’re thinking about it. They’re needing that time and that delay to formulate their answer. And so not every kid is going to just be like this with facts. Not every kid is going to read at the same speed. Some people can read at ungodly rates. I mean, it’s insane, and retain all the information. There’s so much going on in the reading process. It’s not just, can I read the word? It’s can I read the word? Do I have context? Do I have a picture? Do I have a running movie in my head as to what’s going on? I was that kid that was very visual. And I would get so disappointed when I would read a book, love it. I had my movie in my head, and then I would go actually watch a movie of that book. And I was like, “You guys did this totally wrong. This is not the way I pictured it at all. Mine was so much better. And you just ruined this for me. It’s horrible.” And that was me.

Gretchen Roe: 00:37:54.388
Here’s an important thing that we as parents don’t often recognize. If you are like Amanda and me and probably Kathleen, that you form pictures in your head as you think about things, as you read things, what if you don’t form pictures in your head as you think about things? That’s actually a medical condition. It’s called aphantasia. I have two kids with aphantasia. So when I say to them, “Close your eyes and picture a red apple,” they have a blank slate. One of them says, “Nope, just black. Nothing there.” The other one says, “Well, it’s swirly gray and I kind of see something sort of round because I know apples are round.” But they can’t form word pictures. And so if you have a child who has aphantasia, they’re going to be a later emerging reader and it’s harder for them to read. Can they read competently? Absolutely. Both of my aphantasia kids are now adults. Both of them are voracious readers. Can they tell you what they read later? Absolutely. If you ask them to word picture for you, what they’ve read, it’s not going to happen. So if you have a child who’s struggling to emerge as a reader, it would be a great conversation for you to have with that child saying, what do you see when you read that sentence in your head? Because if they say absolutely nothing, just know you’ve got a longer road to walk. Kathleen, can you talk about doing too much for your child? Because I thought this was a really valuable piece of advice.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:39:41.266
Well, I think it’s along the process of modeling that when you’re modeling for your child, you’re showing them how to do it. And in my opinion, it’s not doing too much for them. Modeling is a great technique that sometimes, again, because children learn differently and they process differently and they you know, are able to express themselves differently, sometimes modeling for them and showing them how it should be read or how a math problem should be worked out, gives them the basis of, “Oh, that’s what you mean? Oh, now I see what you mean. Okay, now I can do that.” So I, in my opinion, model for them. Show them what it is that you’re looking for them to do so that they understand what to do. And that is not– that’s not cheating. That’s not giving them the answer. You’re giving them an example of what your expectations are and what you’re looking for from them,

Gretchen Roe: 00:40:41.894
Right. And I think all three of us would tell you if the head, if the voice in your head says, well, you should be able to do this. I want you to walk to your own front door, open the door and escort should out the door because every child gets to where they belong at a different pace. I’m an only child, so I was born a tiny adult, but I can tell you every one of my kids was wildly different in what they were able to do and be successful with at different ages. And you might have a child who is absolutely rip-roaring, successful mathematically, and you think they should be equally successful in reading different parts of the brain. Now we know neurologically, literally that the brain lights up in different places when we read than when we do math. And so we need to be the safe space to help our children move forward. Ladies, I want to turn my attentions now to the questions that parents ask. And the first one I’m going to actually answer. And that was because we had two parents ask it, do we have any tips on reading comprehension for a child with a visual processing disorder? And my first question would be, what does the diagnostician say? Because whomever made the diagnostic of a visual processing disorder should be able to provide you with some supports there to help your student. But secondly, I think anytime you can take a book and you can read a book alongside listening to that book being read to you, whether it’s through Audible, whether it’s through your library app, whether it’s through an app called Chirp, you’re increasing the probability that your child will hear it. And let’s face it, we don’t have 24/7 time to be able to read to our children. If you have a child who has a diagnosis of dyslexia, I would like to give you another resource. It’s called Learning Ally. Learning Ally used to be called Books For The Blind, but Learning Ally is an amazing resource to have context read to your student as your student studies. And anytime we can increase the number of inputs, be it auditory and visual, it becomes a better learning experience.

Amanda Capps: 00:43:20.350
There’s also one called Bookshare that’s similar. So just so that you have all.

Gretchen Roe: 00:43:26.348
Of course, we will have these references for you all in our show notes. I warned you we were going to have a lot of show notes. So those of you who are listening to this as the podcast are definitely going to want to go to the website and look at that. Kathleen, I wondered if you could talk about two seven-year-olds who are struggling with reading. And I had said, let’s define struggling. So your older son set the stage for you of expectation and then Michael ripped the rug out from under you. So let’s define what struggling might be.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:44:10.741
Sure. So well, for my son, in his case, it was that there wasn’t fluency. So comprehension was there. He could understand what he was reading. But there wasn’t fluency in what he was reading. And it’s not even necessarily that all the really long words, it was just certain words. It just altogether just wasn’t fluent. There was one day where he would read a word. And okay, he has that word, and then another day he’d come back to that word, I don’t know that word. And then unfortunately there was the confidence. His confidence went down then because he wanted to be able to read, but then he couldn’t read if I put a paragraph in front of him. He just couldn’t do it. So struggling as far as he didn’t have the confidence that he could read. And then again, for me, the biggest thing was that he wasn’t fluent. He could sound out words. And again, there were sight words that he knew sometimes. Other times he didn’t. So number one thing would just be it wasn’t fluent. It wasn’t just the same. I could give him the same passage every day, and one day he’d read the word some of the words. The next day he wouldn’t.

Gretchen Roe: 00:45:30.560
One of the reasons that I wanted Kathleen to talk about fluency is because as parents, we sometimes think as a child begins to emerge as a reader, “Oh, you read this Bob book. Here, read this and read this and read this.” And what we fail to recognize is fluency is built on reading the same book more than one time. I have to laugh. My middle son is 24 years old and he’s my dyslexic child. And he was absolutely insistent for two solid years that someone read the book a fly went by to him every single day. If you got my six kids together now and somebody said, “A fly went by. I sat by the lake and I looked at the sky,” all of those kids could recite that book from memory. And I’ll be honest with you, for the first year, I really thought he was trying to drive me nuts. But reading the same book multiple times helps that fluency emerge, especially in a child who’s struggling to read. So if you have a child who has a book that they really love, I want to encourage you to read it again with them. Every one of my kids had a book that they absolutely love and they can still recall that book as adults now. And that makes a tremendous difference. Amanda, can you talk about does focusing on phonics with a struggling reader help us or hinder us? The question I’m answering here is, does focusing on spelling help struggling readers, or is it more of a phonics issue? And given the fact that you just learned this lesson from Dr. Holinga a couple of months ago yourself, can you talk about that?

Amanda Capps: 00:47:24.601
Yeah, I mean, again, I would just reiterate that only a certain portion of words are even phonetic to begin with. It’s a good launching place. I mean, you need to start there, the foundation. That’s the foundation. But who would be happy sitting on a concrete foundation for two years? Nobody. You’d be like, “Where’s the house? Where are the walls?” We need to be seeing some progress. We need to be building this house out, right? I mean, if your builder just said, “Well, we got the foundation. The foundation’s really good. It’s really thick. It’s really solid. We spent a lot of time on it you’re still going to be like, “I’m going to fire you and hire somebody who can build the house and produce something.” Right? So I think we can, as parents, kind of stay parked there with our students or get the impression that because we’re seeing certain behaviors or certain patterns over and over again, that’s where the trouble lies, and it’s just not accurate. Back to what you were saying, though, about reading the same book, that’s one of the things that I always loved about Five in a Row. The whole premise of that curriculum is you’re doing those great books, you’re reading the same book five days in a row, and you’re pulling out fun activities that correlate to the other subjects with it, and it’s fantastic. So if you have trouble with that consistency, or you want something that’s a little more structured and puts that together, Five in a Row is fantastic for that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:49:04.469
And so I think that that makes a tremendous amount of difference. Five in a Row is, Amanda, explain what that is because there’s folks who might not have had that exposure, so.

Amanda Capps: 00:49:15.633
Absolutely. So it’s just a great little curriculum that Jane Claire Lambert put together, and it’s classic children’s literature. Before Five in a Row focuses on picture books, so there aren’t any words. Then we graduate into– they have volumes that are like one, two, and three for the– Blueberries for Sal is one that I just love, for example, or Ping the duck. And so then she’s incorporated with the book list a list of activities that you can pull out on a daily basis with very minimal supplies and preparation. So it’s great for busy moms who have a bunch of little ones underfoot, but that you kind of want something a little structured to do. In kindergarten, that’s typically all we do is Spelling You See, Listen and Write A. We do Five in a Row and some Phonics Foundation, and we do Primer. And it’s fantastic. It’s easy. And it gets those consistent patterns going. And the kids love it because they love reading those books, and they enjoy reading them over and over again, whether mom does or not. And then some of those activities are kind of pulled together and structured for you so you’re not scrambling going, “Okay, what do I do with this?” So you can pull out geography and you might bake something together that– in Blueberries for Sal, they bake a pie. So I mean, there’s all these great things that you can kind of do together and it’s just a sweet, sweet experience.

Gretchen Roe: 00:50:50.464
Kathleen, I wonder if you could speak to the question that the parent asked about, how hard should I push my ADHD, dyslexic boys to read independently? They’re 9 and 10. And knowing that you had a son who definitely was on that ADHD continuum, can you talk a little bit about once he started to emerge as a reader, what expectations did you have of him for reading?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:51:21.552
I was alongside of him. We did then body doubling. I wanted to encourage him. I always wanted to congratulate him, just be there to support him with it. So I just stayed alongside him. And honestly, I did that until he told me, “Can I just go read this in my room?” And I did. I just stayed with him until he got to the point that he said, “Okay. I want to take it and I want to read it.” And then I allowed him–

Gretchen Roe: 00:51:51.722
I would have paid money to your face. What was your face when he finally said that to you?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:51:57.876
It was probably mixed because I only have two and young and he’s my youngest, I think I thought, “Oh no, me reading to you is going to be over.” But no, I was glad. I was glad that he felt confident that he could just go and read it on his own, that he didn’t he didn’t need me, even in the room with him or he didn’t need me, reading a paragraph, him reading a paragraph. He could just take it and do it on his own. I was grateful more than anything.

Gretchen Roe: 00:52:29.959
That’s terrific. I’m glad to hear that. And now, of course, he’s an adult and doing well and thriving. And one of the things I think I want our parents to take away is it’s really hard when you’re in the middle of this. But children do grow up and things do change. And you’ll look back on these times and you’ll think, “Wow, we actually really accomplished that.” So you’re fighting a good fight and it’s worth fighting. I want to share something with you that Dr. Holinga shared with me several years ago, and I failed to pull them off my bookshelf before we began. So I’m going to pull these off today. Now, several of you ask, “Okay, what kind of reading curriculum do I need?” And we’re not really here to endorse a reading curricula per se. But Dr. Holinga has written a reading curriculum that is specifically designed for struggling readers. It’s called Happy Cheetah. You can find it at Rainbow Resources or you can find it at happycheetah.com. And I would encourage you to go take a look at that. Before the writing of that curriculum, though, she used to recommend these three books. And I love these books because I watched my granddaughter, who was a struggling reader, emerge as a reader with these three books. Now, let me say as an aside, that young lady needed vision therapy before she could learn to read. But what these books do is something really interesting. They give you as the parent a story to read that is rich in context. It has lots of vocabulary. It has lots of ways to build those mind pictures that we talked about earlier. And then they give your student a very simple story to read back to you. And this is all about developing confidence. So these books are called First Steps, Days Go By and More Days Go By. And of course, we will include those books in our show notes as well as the link to Happy Cheetah. Ladies, I can’t believe it’s five minutes to the hour. Closing thoughts, if you would. Kathleen, I’ll let you go first.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:54:48.710
Well, I would say one of the biggest fears that I think we have as homeschoolers, even though we know we’re not supposed to, is that fear of being behind. And I do know with Michael, when he wasn’t reading, I felt that continually. And I kept thinking, “Okay, well, if he’s not reading, is everything now going to be delayed for the rest of his homeschooling? Am I always going to be behind with him?” But by the time he did start reading when he was 8, I would say by the time he was 10 to 11, he was reading the same chapter books that other kids his age were reading. He caught up. And I had to just kind of trust that that was going to happen. But he caught up and now as an adult, he’s in college and he is doing fantastic. He’s an A student. It catches up. Just to say I understand that people have that fear of being behind and what if my child’s a certain age and they’re still not reading? And I would say, just continue to try to do the things to help them to read and trust that one day they will get there. It will happen.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:03.729
Absolutely wise words, indeed. Amanda.

Amanda Capps: 00:56:09.131
So I would just say, yes, I agree with Kathleen, completely. Find that balance for yourself and your child to where nobody’s feeling that frustration and that angst. Don’t put the pressure on yourself that somehow you’re failing as a parent or as a teacher, instructor. If this doesn’t come easily, my son, who has had the most challenge developing as a fluent reader, he’s absolutely brilliant when it comes to math and some of his other subjects. So everybody has their strengths and weaknesses. That’s across the board. You very rarely find that kid that’s literally good at everything. They do exist. I have seen them. My father is one of them. So they do exist. But they’re the diamond in the rough. I mean, they’re the rare. They’re the rare exception. And typically, we’re going to see either kids that are really strong in the language arts and weak in the math, or they’re going to be really strong in math and weak in the language arts. That’s kind of a given. So if you kind of go into it with that understanding, you can be a little bit more chill about the process and allow yourself and your students the time. The other thing, too, is I tell parents all the time, it takes nine months to grow a baby. You don’t find out you’re pregnant. You don’t see the two little pink lines on the test. And the next day, you have a baby in your hands. You have nine months to kind of figure out what’s going on with your body and learn about all the different stages. So give yourself the same grace when you’re doing your homeschool journey. You can’t fail kindergarten. You can’t do it. It’s okay. Same with some of the other grades as they progress. Everything builds. And I can tell you without a doubt, the things that make the most difference is consistency and encouragement. Hands down.

Gretchen Roe: 00:58:13.338
Absolutely. And so, in my closing words to you, I want to say these three things. First of all, relax. Everybody gets to the end of this journey differently. And if you are anxious, your child will be anxious as well. And what we want is a safe learning environment. If we wanted what the public schools provided, that’s where our kids would be. And if you have a child in public school, you are perfectly capable of sitting down next to your child and helping them at home. We did have a parent who ask us, “What do I do when the school makes demands of my child they’re not ready for?” And that is a recipe. That’s a formula for anxiety. So in that instance, I think I would go in, and I would have a conversation with the teacher and say, “We’re creating a situation I don’t want to be. How can we do this?” Sometimes, it’s simply that the teacher doesn’t call on your student to read out loud. Sometimes it’s that the teacher stands with your student and puts their arm across their back as they read if they’re required to read. There are ways to work that out. And as a parent, I know that if you are resilient enough to raise a child, you’re resilient enough to walk through this struggle as well.

Gretchen Roe: 00:59:36.882
Secondly, I want to encourage you. We have a whole giant list of resources, and I really want to send you to that list of resources. So if you’ve listened to the podcast to this point in time, go to that resource list because it will be valuable to you. And last but not least, I want you to count it all joy. I know this can be a really hard thing to believe when you’re in the middle of a struggle with a student. My dyslexic son did not learn to read until he was more than nine years old. I had a delightful conversation with a friend yesterday whose son was 13 before he read the first word on his own. And then, within a year, he had read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit. So the journey is different for each one of us. And I want you to recognize that your journey is yours. Don’t listen to the naysayers because you are the most equipped person to educate your child. Let me also say as an aside that these two lovely ladies who have joined me today are our customer service support specialists, and they are happy to entertain an individual conversation with you. So if something they said rang a bell with you, pick up the phone and give us a call. We’re here to help you in the journey. That’s the whole goal of these webinars. This podcast is to help you make this journey a profitable one and to help you stay in the journey as long as you possibly can. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. Thank you so much for joining us today. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. And be sure to rate or follow, or review wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it. Thanks again for joining us. We’ll look forward to seeing you all again on a future event. Take care, everyone.

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