As I began the story last week, teaching can take many attempts that often fail before you find the method that works for each student. Here is another story of success I have found with one of the students that attends LIST.
The student I am sharing about is a first grader that has been coming to LIST since the summer. He has a learning disability and a short attention span. When he started coming during the summer, I was pleased to find out he had many basic tools needed to learn to read; his foundation is firm. He came in knowing most, if not all of the letters and their sounds. The challenge has been to help him be able to blend, or sound out, these sounds and form them into words. I’ve tried various methods from using magnet letters that he can manipulate to flashcards, to decodable books (books arranged to introduce sounds and blending skills in a certain order). Occasionally, we’ve had success and he is able to blend two or even three letter words, but the success has been limited and not very consistent. What I have taken note of, is when he attempts to blend a three letter word, he often forgets the first sound and only blends the last, for example in the word cat, he would say at. This is common for many students, but he seems to be stuck at this point, unlike other students. This week, I made a determined effort to cover up the last letter(s) (much to his impatience). While it may have been frustrating to him,, it was the first week that I’ve seen marked progress. We were able to read an entire book, one that had several words; and when I say read, he was doing most of the blending without my help. With isolating the first two letters, he was able to form them in his mind as one sound, then adding the last sound. For instance, with the word cat, he would read ca and then add the t after the first two sounds were in his mind as one unit. This is the usual way of first learning to read, but I realized with his learning disability, he may not able to separate the words into segments on his own. We still have a lot of work to do, but now I believe we are on the right track. If I can train him to look at words in segments by covering up the last part, at some point, I expect, he will be able t do this on his own. Again, as I said last week, it is the small steps that are sometimes the most important.
In other news, we will be hosting a Christmas Gospel concert with the proceeds benefiting LIST on December 13. For more information, or to buy tickets please go to www.listhelps.org.
