Using a Variety of Tricks to Help a Struggling Reader

It’s a great feeling when a teacher hears a struggling student say, “I get it”. The smile and the wide-eyed look on a child’s face when an elusive skill or concept starts to make sense is the kind of moment we hope for every day. I'll never forget the day one of my young charges seemed to break the reading code after over two years of laborious toil. In that moment, when he read an entire page of text without assistance, it was as if he was transformed before my eyes. He was now a reader!

Our student entered kindergarten with very little in the way of early literacy skills. In his early years, he learned to follow routines, keep his belongings in order, and play well with other children. He also seemed to understand the overall workings of the world around him with an intact bank of conceptual knowledge. What he didn’t acquire was the understanding that the curves and lines he saw on paper and the world around him represented sounds and numbers. He also seemed to lack the basic labels for many words (what we call vocabulary) even though he always seemed to get the big picture.

His education became a series of interventions with many trials and errors along the way. For two years he worked on developing an understanding of letters and sounds first through the Wilson Fundations program in kindergarten and first grade and then the Wilson Reading program in grade two. He slowly developed an awareness of letters and eventually could identify the names and sounds. He learned to blend sounds together and could read words. He started working in connected text but stayed at the emerging level (early grade one) for over a year. While his repertoire of letters and sounds improved, he still could only read words he could sound out. When he encountered a word with an unfamiliar letter pattern, he wasn’t able to figure out the word through context. We eventually determined that he just didn’t have the labels for many of the words a child his age would be expected to know, so he couldn’t use context.

We realized he wasn’t going to be able to develop as a reader unless he increased his vocabulary. At the same time a colleague of mine introduced me to the Bits Board app on the iPad. The Bits Board app is a free download with the option of a premium edition for a small price. (My assistive technology specialist set me up with the premium edition with some funds she had available.) The app allows you to create something called a “board”. A board is comprised of a series of blank squares you can type on. These are called “bits”. After you type a word on the “bit”, you can upload a picture from the app’s library or you can go to the web. The other beautiful thing is the app reads the word to the student. Talk about multi-sensory! The student gets to experience the word in print, hear it read aloud, and then see a picture through the flashcard function. (The app also has several nice games included!) I created a board for each new book introduced to the student so he could learn and retain the new vocabulary. Within weeks he started to move quickly. While reading a text, when he came to an unfamiliar word or forgot one of the new words, he went back to the board on his own. He was able to go back as often as he needed to, giving him more independence. The app also allowed him to quickly review previously taught words to maintain retention. Within a month’s time he showed six months worth of improvement!

The student continues to work hard to improve his reading skills. Thanks to BitsBoard he was able to overcome the first big hurdle, giving him to motivation to keep going. For each and every one of our struggling students, whether the challenge is large or small, when the moment comes and they either say it out loud, or their facial expression tells us, "I get it", it's always something to celebrate!

Please check out this video!