by Sarah Major, M.Ed

I have worked extensively with children who struggle with reading. What I learned in the process is that if there is a gap in understanding, that gap might as well be a mile wide because of how effectively it stops a child from progressing.

Parents of kindergartners may not worry too much because they see that their children are still very young. They think that surely with more repetition, their children will begin to catch on and all will be well. It is a lot harder to be sanguine about a sixth grader who is still rooted to the same spot as she was in kindergarten. Unfortunately, now the issues have multiplied because the early foundation for learning was not solid.

The gap, or the missing element, might be a very small and insignificant concept; however, not successfully addressing the gap could result in failure for the child. Many gaps arise from our traditional system of teaching children to read in a sequential, highly left-brained manner. Children who are strongly right brained will, from time to time, simply not understand material that is presented verbally, sequentially and through symbols. These children greatly benefit from tools which utilize visuals, movement or story to create a bridge to understanding. It is easy to ignore the gap, and yet it is not hard to remedy--to provide a visual or kinesthetic bridge just in the nick of time.

Sometimes a concerned parent took a close look at the visual materials I was using and became very concerned that their child would end up depending on the visual tool and never move past it to “real learning.” I totally understand this concern. I certainly wouldn’t like my child to reach high school still singing the ABC song in order to identify letters in the alphabet.
The great news about visual tools is that they truly bridge a gap in learning, but the moment the child skips across the bridge that spans the gap, he understands the concept and does not consciously depend on the visual tool any longer. I promise you that if you use visual tools as you teach, the bridge will not stick to your child’s foot! He will walk over the bridge and move on.

Let’s look at some examples of visual tools and how they work to bridge a gap in understanding.

Learning Numbers

If you have a child that finds it hard to relate number name to symbol, create a visual out of the number so that there is a memory prompt embedded in it. I designed a stylized number set which included a song to make it easy for even toddlers to learn their numbers. By accident I discovered that some younger siblings of preschoolers could locate a number on demand because they had overheard us singing the number song and talking about the stylized picture of each number. While I am not a proponent of urging younger and younger children to count and read, my point is that visual tools are nearly magical for effortlessly conveying learning.

My image for number 8 is the snowman. The child can learn that 8 is the snowman who ate a carrot. At first, in order to recall the name of that symbol, the child might call the number “snowman.” At this point, a concerned parent will understandably worry that her child might not ever call 8 “eight.” But be patient. It won’t be very long at all before the visual fades and your child will just see an 8 and will say “eight.” Using the visuals just makes learning easy and fun.

Teaching Digraphs

It is not easy for a young child to remember which digraph makes which sound. They all look very similar. All have an H, for one thing. We have stylized the digraphs to help your child quickly learn and remember. See SH for instance. Any child will be able to recall a time they heard a baby crying and maybe even heard a mother saying “Shhhh.” Making the S in the digraph into the crying baby and the tall H into the mother who is saying “sh” makes it very easy for your child to learn and recall. The obvious hand motion to go along with this digraph is the one the mother is making in the image. This visual/kinesthetic tool is simple, yet powerful.

Teaching Sight Words

Some children simply will not have much success with the traditional method of teaching reading--learning all the letter names, then attaching a sound to each symbol, then learning to combine these into parts of words (such as blends and word chunks). By the time these children are finally asked to make a word and remember it, they are snowed under with a myriad of details they have no idea what to do with. It is a well-known fact that a large percentage of the population is global in the way that they perceive and process information. Globals have a tough time with steps and sequences when they don’t know what the point is. In other words, globals struggle to learn anything until they have seen a picture of the goal. If you take stylized high frequency words and enjoy them with your young child, then most of the time, having seen the purpose or the final goal behind learning letters and sounds, she will be able to easily break the words apart. If we assume reading has to be taught in a step-by-step sequential manner, we will continue to lose a large percentage of our children.

My experience with kindergarteners who struggled to remember anything about letters and sounds was that once I began using the stylized materials with them, I could hardly keep up. That is how powerful the visuals and the motions are for these young children. It usually did not take more than a few times through the list of stylized words before the children were reading the plain words on the backs of the cards. In fact, after one pass through the cards, the next step is to have the child call out the words on his own. The third step is to turn the cards over to the plain font side and see how many he can read without the visual prompt. Usually he can read a large percentage of the words. Those he cannot recognize are set aside to enjoy again via visuals.

The visual is the bridge to memory, not a crutch or a permanent condition. Using visuals with learning is the best way to work smarter, not harder. Think of the discouragement and failure you will save your visual learner from!

Here is a link to some free downloadable sight word cards: http://www.child-1st.com/new_site/SW_Details.html. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the "try before you buy" link.