It does not seem so long ago that Australians were in awe of the so-called Scandinavian approach to reading. The idea was that learning to read did not start until the age of 7. That is fine if ALL students are 7 when they start learning to read. But somehow this morphed into waiting until a child is 7 to take action when a child was struggling.
What if your child started school at 5 years of age and turned seven at the end of year 1 or so? Do you still wait and see if they are just not getting it?
Accepting the “learn to read at seven” approach seemed to imply a “wait and see” approach when a child did not seem to be moving through the reading levels that quickly. Waiting until the age of 7 for a child who started school at 5 means assessing late in Year 2. Or worse, Year 3.
Unfortunately, this approach means that we can miss struggling readers, who can mask their difficulties until the end of Year 3 or Year 4. Up until then they can depend on words that they know by heart. They can trick a lot of people into thinking all is OK. But by the end of Year 4 things can really fall apart. Put a word they have not managed to memorise in front of them and their amazing memory skills fail them. They will never be able to read the word because they have missed the extra support that they were always going to need.
By Year 4, catching up is a punish. An expensive, emotionally painful, academically damaging punish.
Expensive because we have do not have enough skilled reading small group or 1:1 instructors in our education system. After a while, intense intervention becomes a problem for the family to solve.
Emotionally painful because children have to bear the pain of not being able to progress alongside their peers in typically developing learning. They often tell themselves they’re dumb.
Academically damaging because these students end up pouring their energy into learning to read while the rest of the class started using their reading skills to get on with learning.
Meanwhile, more and more experts are confirming that dyslexia can be spotted before reading lessons start through children’s awareness of the sounds of language, their family history and their ability to understand oral language. These are easy checks to make for speech pathologists.
Many experts believe dyslexia screening of kindergarten children should be as common as a hearing test for pre-schoolers. But change can be slow. There is nothing to stop parents and carers from jumping in early and to check a child’s abilities.
This is important because the “wait and see” approach to a child’s reading journey makes no sense in the face of the up to date evidence.
So don’t play it cool at parent teacher night by agreeing to wait and see. Find out if your child is not keeping up with reading instruction. Here is a timeline for when they should know which letter sounds.
If they are not keeping up, don’t wait and see if they will improve. Get help. Straight away.
It’s cheaper, it’s more effective, it stops the learning gap widening and it relieves a child’s anxiety about not keeping up.
Book a consultation: www.connection-matters.com.au
