Rosemarie Hester is a Learning Specialist living and working in
Brooklyn. A learning specialist can often pinpoint where and why a
child is stalled and offer a tune-up that sends a child on his or her
way.

As a Learning Specialist focused mostly in Park  Slope, Rosemarie has her finger on the pulse about kids, families and reading/writing
instruction. 

She asked me if I would be interested in running a weekly column. Of course I am.

I thought this column could be a real service to OTBKB readers because Rosemarie is aware of the full
range of issues and themes in education and can mix up the columns,
so that they are not all just about the nuts and bolts of providing
support. There are many directions in which to take this idea. Here is Rosemarie’s first column.

The process of learning to read and write is scattered with ‘red light/green light moments’ — moments in which a child can either move forward or experience some sort of confusion, no matter how bright the child, literate the family or good the school. 

If you sense your child is ‘stopped at a red light,’ there are a few things you can do.

–Help him or her to look at the first two or three letters of a work in order, literally saying the names of the letters out loud.  Often, the child is then able to finish the word.

–Learn the seven different types of syllables with your child and help him or her to divide words by syllable, always stopping at unfamiliar words rather than rushing through them.  Here are the syllable types:

           Closed,   as in                           cat,    Ted,   sit,   cot,   cut

            Magic E,   as in                        rake,  eke,  fine,  rote,  cute
, 
            Open,   as in                             no,  so,   ze-ro,  hel-lo

            Consonant LE,   as in               wig-gle,    pur-ple,    bun-dle

             Final Stable                              na-tion, station, na-ture, cul-ture

             Bossy R                                    or-der,  form, form-er,  corn, fern

             Vowel Pairs                              Au-gust, team, rain, field, group

–also very useful to have a pencil handy when reading for marking in a text.  (If that is not an option, have a xerox copy available, with enlarged text, if that is appropriate)  Child or parent can learn to loop under syllables which will train the eye through practice.  Most words are combinations of different syllable types. 

These three strategies will be useful for many kinds of learners if practiced in small sessions and repeated over time.  Think of these as your child’s ‘power hours,’ for education is certainly empowerment!  More next week about how to support your child’s learning.