This appendix can also make a good ‘starting place’ for the parent of the older child. All school skills are built on foundation skills so many strategy and activity suggestions refer to earlier chapters and appendices, but you may find it useful to pinpoint the ‘skill gaps’ that are preventing a child reading, writing, spelling or doing mathematics. Reading is a language-based skill so you might also like to reread chapters 9 and 15, which discuss language development.
In Chapter 19 is a list of the skills required for reading and the background of how they develop. Here they are again, but with strategies and activities to build each skill when it didn’t happen ‘the first time around’.
Ask yourself, ‘Has my child integrated her primitive reflexes, particularly her asymmetrical tonic neck reflex?’ You need to work through Appendix III to answer this question and help your child if active primitive reflexes are still present.
Ask yourself:
Does my child have a dominant hand? If she doesn’t then she will not have a dominant eye either.
Does my child have a dominant eye?
Can my child direct her eyes to track along a straight line without a ‘jerk’ in the middle?
Do her eyes converge — that is, do both her eyes point at the same close object?
(Pages 216–218 in Chapter 19 tell you how to check for all these skills.)
Here are some suggestions to help develop eye dominance and convergence:
Eye movement co-develops with the integration of primitive reflexes. Do go back and check through Appendix III if you feel that eye movement is a concern for your child. For example, if your child doesn’t have eye dominance by around the age of six, suspect an active asymmetrical tonic neck reflex, tonic labyrinthine reflex and/or a symmetrical tonic neck reflex.
A developmental optometrist (not just one that concerns himself with visual acuity but also visual perception) is the relevant professional here. However, the more reputable optometrists will not attempt to work with children who still have primitive reflexes in place. Primitive reflex integration is the bottom rung on the developmental hierarchy, which means it needs to be dealt with first.
Encourage your child to play on equipment that moves, such as twirlers, rockers, barrels, seesaws, swings, gym balls, pillows, trampolines, hammocks, dangling tyres and so on. The point of the moving is that it re-creates early infancy, which is when these eye movements usually develop as the baby responds to an unexpected movement event.
Slow movements are important here. It is during that gentle early rocking, where baby’s eyes are fixed upon your face, that eyes become yoked together. Gently rock your child in a big rocker or on an inflatable ball, talking to her, so that she must move her eyes to keep them on your face.
Encourage your child to twirl, roll and crawl to music.
While she is jumping or swinging or rocking, encourage her to catch and throw a ball or beanbag with you.
Playing with kaleidoscopes is great for pushing along eye dominance and convergence.
Play the torch chasey game, where you and your child each have a torch. Cover the torches with different coloured cellophane paper, shine them on the ceiling and have the light beams chase each other.
There are more ideas in Appendix IV for improving visual skills.
Here are some ideas for developing smooth visual tracking in your child:
Crossing the midline is one of the frequent focuses of occupational therapists. Difficulty in doing this is a marker not just for difficulty in reading but also difficulty with fine motor skills. It is something babies normally learn in crawling, and playing crawling games with your older child will definitely help her.
Play ‘wheelbarrows’. Be aware that children frequently have a time period where they are suddenly unable to play wheelbarrows, and then the ability returns again. Children with an active asymmetrical tonic neck reflex must be careful when playing wheelbarrows not to suddenly lose power in one arm and land painfully on the side of the face. Add in ‘crossing hands’ to wheelbarrow walking once your child is a proficient ‘little wheelbarrow’.
Do puzzles with your child. First of all, ensure she is not W-sitting, then place the puzzle pieces on the non-dominant side of her body. She must reach across with her dominant hand to pick up the pieces. (When I was working with impulsive children who struggled with midline crossing, I would ask them to sit on their ‘helper’ hand.) Games like Chinese chequers or noughts and crosses can also be played in this way.
If your child loves colouring-in, make sure she is not carefully colouring just a tiny piece of the picture at a time and then shifting the paper. This is classic midline-crossing avoidance. Insist on long strokes with the pencil.
Blow bubbles with her and insist that she uses just her dominant hand to pop them.
Ask yourself:
Does my child have ‘good enough’ mood management skills to be able to keep trying in the face of the inevitable frustration that learning to read brings?
Can my child shift her attention at will?
Are her impulse control and attention sufficient so that she doesn’t impulsively respond to a ‘c’ and say ‘cow’ but stops and thinks for a minute?
If these skills are missing I would recommend working through appendices I, II and III and reading the main body of the book.
Ask yourself:
Can my child easily blend together ‘c’ (pause) ‘a’ (pause) ‘t’ to make ‘cat’?
Can my child tell me what sound a word starts with? (For example, ‘What is the first sound in zoo?’)
Can my child tell me what sound is in the middle and on the end of a word?
Can she easily match letters with letter sounds?
If these skills are missing your child will struggle with reading. These activities (plus the blending games in chapter 17) will help these skills develop so she’s ready to read:
Sing with your child as much as you can. Both of you should hold your hands under your chins as you sing to help her hear the syllables.39 Ballads and nursery rhymes with their greater melody and slower speeds should be your focus. You do not need to do this with the words in front of you initially as this is a ‘hearing’ activity not a reading one. Clear enunciation of sounds is required. Make sure you don’t run the words together.
Listen to music together. Teach your child the different sounds of the different instruments and ask her to tell you when she can hear the ‘voice’ of the bassoon or the viola. This is helping your child develop the ability to pick out one sound in a complex background. You can’t go past ‘Peter and the Wolf’ for this exercise.
Beat out rhythms with your child, not just with your hands but also with your feet and with your heads.
In the car play ‘I spy’ or ‘Spotto’ (which is about things regularly appearing outside the car). ‘I saw it again and it started with t!’ Remember to use the sound the letter makes rather than its name.
Write your child’s stories out for her. Help her elaborate by asking questions, but remember to enjoy every word she utters. This is a more powerful contributor to your child’s ability to link sounds with letter shapes than reading.
Make or purchase some sandpaper letters. Play ‘Is this an “a”?’, where your child must feel the shape with her eyes closed. You are matching visual, tactile and auditory information, and better phonemic awareness usually follows as a result. Along the same lines, also write letters on her back. You need to build up to this, though. Begin by drawing ‘stories’ on her back when she is little: ‘And Revvy the little red truck screamed around the corner and suddenly there was a rabbit! He slammed on his brakes.’ Accompany your story with matching movements. Then you can ask your child to say what animal movement you have drawn on her back, and what shape you have drawn. Eventually, when she is five or six, you will be able to start drawing letters.
Card games such as Go Fish and Rummy build auditory memory.
Make sure you speak more slowly. If you talk at breakneck speed it is much harder for anyone, let alone your child, to hear the component syllables. Habitually build some ‘paused words’ into your talking. ‘If you go and get me a b (pause) oo (pause) k, I’ll read it to you.’ The motivation to decode and a clue is built right in.
If this is a real area of concern for you — if you feel your child is strongly resisting listening — then consider finding a sound therapist. (Two of the big names in sound therapy are Samona and Tomatis.) Consider strongly that your child may have difficulties with other areas of sensory processing and return to Appendix IV. Choose some games that reduce ‘auditory defensiveness’ from those pages.
Ask yourself:
Does my child have a good memory for what she has seen?
Is she good at noticing subtle differences in pictures?
This is another very important set of skills for reading. Here are some suggestions:
One classic game is Hunt The Thimble. Take any small object (a small plastic bear is a good one) and hide it in plain sight. You can give clues of ‘hotter and colder’ or ‘higher and lower’ while your child searches for it.
The Where’s Wally? and Usborne puzzle books (and all the other similar books) help your child practice finding just one object in a complex background.
Sorting games are also very important, and sorting is something you need to directly teach children. A wonderful big box of assorted old buttons is an excellent teaching tool. Start with teaching size discrimination — big and little — and then move on to colour and finally examine shape. Don’t expect your child to see the differences, you will have to teach her. In doing so you are sharpening her perception by adding language into the tool mix.
Always start from large differences before progressing to smaller ones. Is it a pig or a cow? What is the difference between the two pigs on the page? Is one dog spotty and the other not? Is one face smiling and the other one sad? The first difference — between a pig and cow — is a lot more noticeable. The second difference — between two pink pigs — is going to be more challenging to detect. Being able to tell the difference between letters is obviously more challenging still.
Barrier games are where you each have an identical set of cards to construct a room or a face or a scene to match the other person. Your child might say, ‘My man has blue eyes, a pig’s nose and a droopy moustache’, and then you must build that. Then you both check to see if the two pictures match.
Play ‘find the’ games in books — for example, Where is the horse? Where is the pig? — and all that is showing of each is the tail or an ear. These games can also be played while tidying up. ‘Where is your elephant?’ you ask, knowing that your child will only be able to see its trunk poking out from under a cushion.
Jigsaws are excellent to build skills. Toy libraries and council libraries lend these out. We recommend doing just one at a time, and doing it with your child over and over. The first few times you are solving the puzzle using the different visual clues but eventually she learns to operate purely from the memory of how it goes together.
It is really hard to go past playing cards. So useful are they that Mum helped a mother who belonged to a particularly strict religious order to gain dispensation to have a pack in her house to play card games with her daughter. Mind you, these were simple games like Old Maid, where the cards could not possibly be used for gambling. In the absence of card games Mum makes up games that involve remembering movement sequences. You do a hop, your child does a hop. You do a hop and clap and another hop and your child copies this. Then it is your child’s turn to make up a movement sequence. Some of the really super card games to build visual memory include:
Clock Patience. You deal out a clock face, with another pile in the middle, making 13 piles of four cards each. You then pick up a card from the middle, and then put it in the right spot on the clock, and take a card from that pile. The game often ‘comes out’ and builds on number recognition and remembering position
Snap! The deck of cards is divided among the players and everyone has a turn putting a card down on the same central pile. You always have to hold in your mind the card at the top of the pile as well as the one that’s just been put down. If there’s a match, every participant tries to be the first to get their hand on the pile while screaming out ‘Snap!’
The board games that require visual memory as part of designing strategy are good, such as Chinese chequers, draughts and chess. It is not uncommon for little boys to be able to play chess in advance of being able to read.
Finally, ask yourself:
Does my child like books?
Does she love stories?
Has my child consistently said to me that she wants to learn to read?
If you are getting any ‘no’s’ here then your child isn’t motivated to learn. You need to think about how to create that motivation. The answer is both basic and drastic. Everyone (except most people with autism) loves stories. We are all hungry for the experience of living in the skins of those who are braver, bigger, stranger and grander than ourselves. Where is your child currently getting her story supply? From the TV set? From a regular diet of DVDs and videos? Or audio books? Cut off the non-storybook supply and explain to your child just why you are doing so.
Return to reading her stories, but choose those stories with a history of addicting readers. For the child who loves animals there are Gerald Durrell and James Herriot. For the little girl who loves acting and dancing there is Noel Streatfield. For the child with an appetite for the kooky and offbeat choose some of the non-fiction written by Herbie Brennan. Diana Wynne-Jones writes fantasy centred on children’s relationships. Margaret Mahy’s books show magic springing from the everyday. Try Justin D’Ath for adventure. Lie on the bed with your child, read aloud and point to the words as you read them. Stop in motivating places and leave the book by her bed.
Also, if you want your child to be a reader, never use ‘No story time tonight!’ as a punishment. Keep that time sacred until she is reading independently.