Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
Patterns sit underneath both reading and arithmetic. Blue, red, green, blue, red, green: making a sequence, copying it, then breaking it on purpose builds the ordering that words and numbers both run on.
Use blocks, beads, claps, a drum, anything with an order to it. Ask the child to make the same pattern, then to spoil it deliberately and tell you where. The advantage of doing this with hands and sound is that it works the same machinery as reading without any of the dread a book or a worksheet brings with it, which matters a great deal for a child who has already decided they are bad at this.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Lord, lift up my heart (Quran 20:25) is what Moses asked for before anything practical. Easing the fear first and then doing the work is an old order of operations.
قَالَ رَبِّ ٱشۡرَحۡ لِي صَدۡرِي
Moses said, ‘Lord, lift up my heart
Qur’an 20:25read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A small randomised trial found rhythm based music training improved phonological awareness and some reading skills in children with dyslexia, which is the closest direct support for working on timing and sequence away from print. Separately, early cognitive behavioural work with anxious adolescents reduced test and social anxiety with benefits still visible two years later, so the fear around these tasks is itself treatable rather than something to work around forever. Both are modest studies and neither tested patterns made from blocks.
Flaugnacco E, Lopez L, Terribili C, Montico M, Zoia S, Schön D. (2015). Music Training Increases Phonological Awareness and Reading Skills in Developmental Dyslexia: A Randomized Control Trial.. PloS one doi
de Hullu E, Sportel BE, Nauta MH, de Jong PJ. (2017). Cognitive bias modification and CBT as early interventions for adolescent social and test anxiety: Two-year follow-up of a randomized controlled trial.. Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Putting things in order is the same job whether the things are sounds in a word or digits in a number.
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
If a parent has been saying since the first year of school that something is wrong with their child's reading, start from the assumption that they are right. They have watched more of it than anyone else has.
Find something the child already loves, a team, an orchestra, a game, and lay their results over it. These players are strong, these ones need coaching, and none of it means the team is no good.
When the sound scores and the movement scores are both near the floor, you are looking at more than a reading problem. That pattern needs specialist teaching rather than a general classroom programme with a bit more of it.