When Learning to Read Becomes a Challenge

By the time children enter school, their oral language is very well-developed. When they are tasked with using symbols to represent what they hear and say, challenges emerge. What is missing for many children is the means of linking their spoken language to groups of abstract symbols (words) so the process becomes natural and instinctive and so reading comprehension occurs.

The task before us is how to teach reading in a way that children will retain their mental images of what is being communicated even when they are working with just symbols. Child1st reading resources are designed to provide those mental images as children are learning to read so they don’t struggle to learn.

What are Visual and Kinesthetic Learners?

Children are neurodiverse, meaning there is a range of processing styles that stretch from strong left-brain processing, clear across the spectrum to strongly right-brain processing. These processing styles matter because when children are learning a new skill, they rely on their natural wiring which means the more closely the lesson matches their wiring, the easier learning will become. Learning to read is most easy for strong left-brain processors because they deal with symbols most easily. Right-brain processors think in pictures and learn from whole to part, meaning they need to see whole words first and they need to form a mental image of what the symbols represent. Many strongly right-brain processors have trouble creating images for themselves and they bog down pretty quickly in step-by-step instruction in reading. They need to know the point of the steps before the steps will mean anything to them.

This section shines a light on some of the ways in which children take in, process, use, and remember information. 

Left-brain dominant processors:	Right-brain dominant processors:
who work well with abstract symbols	for which symbols are meaningless
who think in words	who think in pictures
who can learn and use steps in a procedure	who need the goal and create a procedure for themselves
who are sequential processors	who are global processors
who learn from part to whole	who learn from whole to part
whom images are superfluous	who must have images to learn
who benefit from drill and repetition	who learn visually, all at once, and permanently
who view their work as an end in itself	who need relevance and a link to their life
who can remember isolated data	who need a meaningful link to known data – a context
who can articulate their thoughts verbally	who understand but struggle to verbalize

Teaching Reading to Right-Brain Learners

Fortunately, when children are at the age where they are learning to read, they are all in the stage of development in which their right hemisphere is rapidly developing. This means that teaching in a right-brain-friendly manner will reach all of them at once! Traditional methods of teaching reading are purely left-brained and utilizing them with children who are still in the right-brain stage of development creates a miss-match which makes learning to read more difficult than it should be.

How to Teach Reading, Fluency, and Comprehension 

Easy-for-Me™ Reading is designed to be used by anyone! Just follow the directions, the lessons will appeal to right-brain learners, and seeing their responses to this approach will reveal how to teach reading in a way that bridges gaps for young children. Easy-for-Me™ Reading takes abstract, left-brain content and strategies and transforms them into meaningful, right-brain friendly content to ease children into learning to read.

Easy-for-Me™ combines sight word instruction with explicit, systematic phonics instruction because both are important for emerging readers. Reading lessons are truly multi-sensory which means that children who have dyslexia, autism, auditory processing challenges, those with Down Syndrome, or ADHD will enjoy learning in a way that makes sense to them.

Using SnapWords® along with teaching phonics aids in both reading fluency and comprehension. Children will acquire a strong base of over 600 words and will learn how to break the words apart into their phonics base.

Reading FAQs

Q: Who is Easy-for-Me™ Reading For?

A: Easy-for-Me™ Reading is perfectly suited for beginners learning to read, but has an extensive track record of bringing children to grade level who had struggled under more traditional methods, who are missing critical reading skills, and who have been unable to make the leap from oral to written language. This includes children in Special Education, resource rooms, students who are ESOL, and more.

Q: How Can You Teach a Child with Dyslexia to Read?

A: Children with Dyslexia benefit enormously from Easy-for-Me™ Reading because teaching whole words embedded in images keeps the letters from bouncing around, shows the meaning of the words, enables the learner to read the whole words, and allows them to write the words from the SnapWords® images they see in their imaginations. Related phonics instruction shows them the patterns that exist in our language by grouping many words together that share a sound spelling (or phonics concept) and they are then able to locate those “word chunks” in their reading.

Q: How Can you Help a Child Struggling with Reading?

A: If children are struggling to read, most often it is because the process of learning all the steps and phonics rules has them stumped. They are stuck on the seemingly conflicting phonics rules and by the groups of letters they cannot sound out for the life of them. When you use Easy-for-Me™ Reading, all those contradictions are clarified. Using SnapWords® gives them an extensive base of words they can recognize on sight and once they are reading, it becomes simple to break all those words apart into their phonics concepts (sound spellings) and enable them to sound out new and more difficult words. SnapWords® and Easy-for-Me™ are the critically important springboards to reading success.

Do You Have Questions About How to Teaching Reading?

We would love to help! We are very familiar with the roadblocks, struggles, and frustrations that can arise with teaching a child to read. If you have any questions, please contact our team today!

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