Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
A child working words out from the pictures and the shape of the sentence is guessing well, not reading yet. It usually holds up until around the third year of school and then gives way, because the pictures stop and the words get longer.
Ask to hear the child read something with no illustrations and no predictable pattern. That is where you find out whether sounds and letters have been learned or worked around. Programmes that teach letters without teaching sounds, or that hand a child a book and expect reading to arrive, leave the children who most need instruction holding a strategy with an expiry date on it. Being able to name that difference is useful in a school meeting.
Qur’an and Sunnah
The first word given was Read, in the name of your Lord who created (Quran 96:1). It was said to a man who did not read, so standing at the very beginning of reading is where the whole thing starts.
ٱقۡرَأۡ بِٱسۡمِ رَبِّكَ ٱلَّذِي خَلَقَ
Read! In the name of your Lord who created
Qur’an 96:1read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Reviews of the field define dyslexia as a difficulty in learning to decode and spell, with the current account being multi-factorial rather than one hidden cause unrelated to general ability. If decoding is the difficulty, then teaching which quietly lets a child avoid decoding is not treating it. This is a conceptual review rather than a comparison of programmes, so it tells you what the target is, not which package to buy.
Snowling MJ, Hulme C, Nation K. (2020). Defining and understanding dyslexia: past, present and future.. Oxford review of education doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Reading runs on turning letters into sounds, and a child who has learned to guess has not been taught that part yet.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Before drilling number facts, check whether the child has any feel for how much a number is. Which pile is bigger, is eight nearer to ten or to two, give me three of those.
You do not need to become a reading specialist to be useful in a school meeting. A few hours with the current material on how reading is learned will put you ahead of most of the room, and you can carry it in kindly rather than as a challenge.
Some people get all the way to university before anything is named, then meet eighty pages of reading a night and cannot do it. Nothing broke that night. The volume simply outgrew a way of coping that had held for years.