Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

Mike Smith:
This week, Faith Berens, a special needs coordinator at HSLDA, has been discussing teaching students who are struggling with reading. Faith, what practical things can parents do to help a struggling reader?

Faith Berens:
One of the first things I’d like to encourage families to do is if their child has been identified as having a specific difficulty, such as that underlying phonological processing difficulty that we talked about earlier in the week, is to not be afraid to get some supplemental help to remediate those difficulties early. Make sure they're using a balanced, systematic, sequential phonics program, but also couple that with whole word instruction, teaching their children sight words.

Make reading fun. Offer lots and lots of time with text that’s at their easy and instructional level, to make sure that their children are not reading at a frustration level. And also bring in multi-sensory teaching, such as tactile and movement and music, color and picture, to help their children learn to read. Just make reading fun and exciting at home.

Mike:
These are great suggestions, Faith. On our next program, we’ll continue this topic. And until then, I’m Mike Smith.