Behavioural Reading techniques have been changing reading lives for the last eight years in private practice. Over the last 16mths these techniques have also been available to individual teachers.
This year we have started implementing three pilot school programs. I've been sitting in on Phil's in-service sessions and I can't believe how much I learn every day I listen to him and watch him implementing the program.
This week I've learned Behavioural Reading is not a 'reading program' at all. It is in fact, a defined set of neurological reading techniques that all students, young or old, require to become good readers.
Here are some of the tips Phil gave the teachers in the first two weeks.
Encourage your students and breakdown those negative barriers, by showing your students that 'nobody knows all the words'. Have an adult read a medical excerpt to show how they stumble on the medical words just like children stumble while learning the words.
There is Decoding and there is Reading. Keep these two concepts separate. Learning to read should be assisted by an adult ready to help with the tricky words so that the student doesn't stumble and create poor reading behaviours. Decoding is a different skill - phonics and phonemes form part of the decoding process. Always keep the Learning to Read process and material 'one step easier'. Use underline priming and move forward when the student is reading this material comfortably and easily adding words to their reading vocabulary.
Your students will know 7000-9000 words in early to mid primary. Many of these words will be heard and spoken, but are not yet in the reading brain. There are hundreds of thousands of words to learn. Nobody can know all of those words. Medical specialists are better at the medical words. Boat builders are better at the boat words and computer programmers know computer words. Let them see that we all have to put our decoding behaviours into practice at some stage. and although this may seem like a 'struggle', it's really just 'effort'.
Happy teaching!
Paula