WHY DO SO MANY CHILDREN FIND READING DIFFICULT?

The State of North Carolina (and much of the rest of the US, as well) has convinced itself that the way to improve reading in children is to start teaching it an an earlier age.  Unfortunately, reading readiness is a developmental issue.  It can't be hurried.  Some children aren't ready to read until second grade.  When kindergartens, and even pre-schools, teach reading to children who aren't ready, they are simply setting up more and more children for failure.

Don't misunderstand.  The idea of giving children the opportunity to learn reading at an earlier age is great.  But the State (not to mention the preschools who follow its lead) is making a big mistake by mandating early reading.  Kids who just "don't get it" for a couple of years are going to give up.  They stop trying just when they reach the point at which they become able to do it.

What they need at this point is a boost to their confidence.  A+ Tutoring starts with simple phonics tasks that the students can succeed at, and works up gradually, making sure that success at each stage is within their grasp.  If a child is not ready for us to move on, we don't.

Another problem is that many teachers do not put sufficient stress on phonics.  Starting out with sight words works well enough for some children.  But for others, it will seem to work for a few years, until the children have memorized all the words their memories can hold.  Then, while the other students are learning more and more words by sounding them out, these students are suddenly stuck.  For students who don't know any phonics, they've reached the end of their road.  If they haven't seen a word before, and learned it, they are totally unable to read it.

Even some teachers that genuinely try to teach phonics don't do it properly.  For instance, there seems to be an almost universal belief among educators (and, through them, among parents) that the first step children should take in order to  help them read is to learn the alphabet.  This is an important skill, true enough; it's important for two purposes: talking about letters (as in spelling out loud), and looking up or organizing entries in a dictionary, or anything else arranged in alphabetical order.  But both of those activities can wait.  Teaching the alphabet early on is actually counter-productive.

What the children need to know right away is the sounds of the letters, not their names.  The names are especially confusing for the letters h, w, and y; but they also cause difficulties with the pairs of letters c-s and g-j, and among the other letters, all that don't start with their sound (f, l, m, n, r, s, and x).  And, while the names for the remaining letters aren't too confusing, they aren't very helpful either.  They result in children reading words like "bed" as beady.

A+ Tutoring teaches the sounds first, along with how to put them together.  After the basic phonics code is in place, then we move on to sightwords for the most common words.  By this point, the children already know how to attempt to decipher words they haven't seen, so learning the sightwords won't block their ability to do that later.

For a listing of the academic topics covered by A+ Tutoring at different age levels, see the curriculum matrix,