I love when something I hear on the radio or in a classroom confirms a theory I've been working on, on my own.
For a while now, with the kids I work with during reading tutoring, I've noticed that they do best when they only have to read one sentence at a time. When someone is reading word by word and isn't fluent enough for long passages, anything more than one sentence is really overwhelming - they can read those words, just not when they're presented in a huge jumble!
And the goal, of course, is to work toward being able to read those long passages . . . to try to counter this, I've tried alternating easier books (with fewer words per page) with harder books (with a lot of words per page), or asking the student to read just one sentence on each page, while I read the rest and keep the story moving forward.
Sometimes I take a story and write, in fairly large print, the one sentence per page they're going to read, and I let them hold THAT book. I've had a lot of success with this approach, using Frog and Toad stories, as well as Henry and Mudge.
So on Tuesday I heard a radio story that caught my attention. A scientist with reading difficulties discovered he had an easier time reading text on his smart phone:
Schneps has published a new study in the journal PLOS ONE. It shows that some people with dyslexia are able to read faster and comprehend more, using a small eReader. What's key, Schneps says, is displaying fewer words on the screen - maybe just two or three per line.SCHNEPS: It's like blinders on a horse. You're kind of limiting the distractions around you and focusing on the words you're trying to read at the moment.
I have to admit, when I heard the story, I shouted at my radio: I KNEW IT!
P.S. I think this is one of the reasons that all readers, and especially struggling readers, love Mo Willems' Elephant and Piggie books. The stories are hilarious, the illustrations are sparse, and there's not too many words per page - so readers can enjoy a good book without the visual stress that they find in other books. Also? Mo Willems is the best children's author on Earth.
