Gretchen Roe: 00:00:04.766
[music] Welcome to The Demme Learning Show. Our mission here is to help families stay in the learning journey wherever it takes them. This bonus episode was previously recorded as a webinar and was not created with the audio listener in mind. We hope you will find value in today’s episode.

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:23.032
Hello, everyone. Welcome. We’re so delighted to welcome you this afternoon to this presentation that is so vitally important. And I’m Gretchen Roe, and I’m honored to welcome my colleagues, Amanda Capps and Kathleen Calabrese, and the three of us have similar stories but very different stories about children who struggled to emerge as readers. So we have a lot to share with you today. I’m going to let Amanda and Kathleen introduce themselves, and then we’ll get started into the meat of the day. Amanda, how about you start for us today?

Amanda Capps: 00:00:56.432
Sure, I’m Amanda Capps. I’m coming to you from Northwest Arkansas where I am a second-generation homeschooler and mother of eight. My husband of almost 15 years is a first responder, so that makes life a little crazy, and I’ve worked in customer service with Demme Learning for almost 13 years now supporting customers with everything from placing orders to returns to placement to handholding and praying alongside them as they make the decisions as to what they need to best educate their families.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:01:30.246
My name is Kathleen Calabrese. I have homeschooled for 21 years. I just graduated my youngest. I’m not quite sure that I’m completely happy about that, I almost wish I was still homeschooling, but it is what it is. It’s time for a new season. I have two boys, one is 25 and the other is 18, and they both homeschooled all the way through. And I’ve been working at Demme Learning Customer Service for over a year now.

Gretchen Roe: 00:01:59.969
And we are delighted to welcome Kathleen. Even though her tenure with Demme Learning has been brief, her experience is rich. And you may have talked to her on the phone or live chat. And I promise you, it would have been a worthwhile conversation. So we each bring to the table a different experience about homeschooling, so particularly homeschooling kids who struggle to emerge with readers. So I think I’m going to ask Amanda to briefly recap her personal story and then I’ll have Kathleen do the same. Amanda?

Amanda Capps: 00:02:38.650
So my story actually starts when I was a homeschooled kid myself. I had a sister and a brother who had some learning challenges. My sister was specifically diagnosed with visual and auditory processing issues, and then I had a brother that was diagnosed with ADD and was a slow reader. He also had working memory issues which all contributed to a challenging homeschool experience. And so the real benefit that I had was, because I was the oldest of these siblings and because my mom wanted me to have some built-in empathy for how hard they had to work, she took me to a lot of the different workshops and things that she did or she was learning about or equipping herself with in order to support them and then I was also actively engaged in helping with those kids. So that kind of was where my foundation started. And then fast forward to marrying a guy with dyslexia and a guy that was diagnosed with Irlen, and then we have a couple of kids ourselves that have had some dyslexia diagnosis. And then we also have had a couple that have just needed vision therapy to just correct some very minimal things, but it made all the difference in the world to them. And so I would say some of the things that I started noticing right off the bat were just fatigue, trouble focusing on what I was pointing to or what we were talking about, not wanting to look at the page, odd gaps, penmanship that was just atrocious or going this way down the page or this way. We couldn’t follow a line to save our lives, asking questions and hearing things like there’s movement, the words are moving, or I don’t see punctuation, or I don’t see letters. That was something that was really telling to me as far as my own experience of, “Wait a second, we’ve got something going on and we need to figure it out.” Also trying to spend two years getting one child just to recognize their letters consistently seemed a little much. I’m not going to lie.

Gretchen Roe: 00:04:58.586
We only laugh because we’ve been there. So I totally get that. Kathleen, how about your experience?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:05:05.028
Sure. So my oldest is 25. And my kids are eight years apart. So by the time he was preschool kindergarten age, I just had one child. And when it was time to start school with him, as far as reading, I got Hooked on Phonics because I thought that was a good way to go. And he took off, and he was reading. And by kindergarten, he was reading short chapter books. And I thought, “Okay, this homeschooling thing is easy. I can do this.” And this is my guinea pig child who anything I put in front of him and said, “Here Anthony, this is what we’re doing,” he did it. He was compliant and just kind of did whatever I gave him to do. And then eight years later, my youngest son, Michael, came along. And I actually knew by the time he was four years old that he just wasn’t ready for school yet. So I really didn’t push it. Plus, I was a little bit more experienced in homeschooling, and I knew just let him play. Let him learn through playing. He’s not ready.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:06:07.714
But when it was time for kindergarten, I said, “Okay, Michael, we have to take this seriously now. It’s kindergarten time.” And there were a number of things between him flying back and forth over the couch and just not being able to sit at the table or sit still at all. But I took out that Hooked on Phonics and no, it didn’t work. And so then I thought, “Well, it’s the Hooked on Phonics.” And I tried another curriculum and another curriculum and another curriculum. And I probably tried every reading curriculum there is because I kept feeling for myself, “Well, it must be the curriculum. It must be something that I’m doing wrong.” And he learned to read when he was eight years old. And I realized now, I even realized then, I guess, he learned to read at eight years old because that’s when he was ready to read. He was not ready to read prior to that. It had nothing to do with what curriculum I was using. He wasn’t ready prior to that. So lesson learned.

Gretchen Roe: 00:07:09.653
Well, I think that I find tenets of Amanda’s story and Kathleen’s in my own. My husband and I have six children. We had four in eight years, and then we were quite convinced we were done. And when the youngest was in kindergarten, I found myself expecting number five. And then when that one was in kindergarten, I found myself expecting number six. So we kept forgetting what it was like to have people in diapers. But my oldest two children read as post-high schoolers by the time they hit third grade. And so like Kathleen, I thought it was easy peasy lemon squeezy. And then my third and fourth children were very neurotypical. They read on time. They read well. They were avid readers. I think it is a little bit safe to say that it’s harder to encourage a child to read in this day and age with the advent of digital devices than it was when I homeschooled my kids. They range in age from 36 to 18. But my fifth child could not read and did not learn to read until he was nine and a half. Now, unlike Kathleen, whose son was not ready until he was eight, Duncan was more than– obstacle. We just could not surmount. And one of the things that we discovered with him is a lot of his neurological information was not going from one side of his brain to the other side of his brain. He couldn’t skip. He couldn’t catch a ball. He couldn’t kick a ball accurately with either foot. And all of those things were neurological indicators that he had missed some developmental milestones when he was a toddler. And so we needed to remediate that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:08:59.431
And ultimately, we did get a diagnosis of dyslexia for him. And I have to tell you that dyslexia has become an industry in this country. And there’s lots of people who will help you with a diagnosis. Our diagnosis cost us over $4,000. And then I still had a child to educate. So I’m not always sure that the diagnosis is the penultimate solution. Today, what we want to do is we want to offer you some solutions for your children as you see them struggle to emerge as readers. Kathleen’s already given you the first one, which is maybe they’re not ready. Maybe they’re just not ready to learn to read. And it is perfectly okay.

Gretchen Roe: 00:09:40.932
One of the things that we want to encourage you is to read your own child, not to read the highlight reels from the folks in your homeschool journey that you might encounter, because invariably, you will find those precocious kids who are like my two eldest children, and then you’ll think there’s a deficit with your child. And maybe it is that they’re just not ready.

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:02.940
Now as we go on, Amanda has brought up some things about vision, and we will address those. But what I want to begin with is we have a list. Actually, Kathleen was very thorough, and I’m very grateful to her because we have so many things we have to share with you. We’re going to stick with our list a little bit today. So, Amanda, can you start talking about that first thing on our list about kids and directions and things like that that parents might look for?

Amanda Capps: 00:10:32.682
Absolutely. So my first two were also very much like yours in that they were self-taught readers. They read fluently. They were good readers. But what I noticed with my oldest daughter was her handwriting. And when I talk about handwriting, I mean doctors have better handwriting than this child had. And I was concerned, and I was noticing that there were these big gaps in her writing. And so she was one of my kiddos that actually ended up wearing glasses for about three years. And she went through a round of about six months of vision therapy, and we did the exercises and did the whole thing. And then she was golden. It corrected that visual issue.

Amanda Capps: 00:11:17.731
Like I said, it never impacted her reading. I mean, if I wouldn’t have noticed what was going on with her writing, I probably wouldn’t really have ever picked up on anything with her. And she only had to wear glasses for a short amount of time. Now there’s a whole nother part of the brain that can give you a clue that something is going on, and that is how they organize information and whether they’re able to complete delegated tasks. So giving them verbal instructions, and are they able to complete those things? Because dyslexia is, I like to think of it as like an umbrella. It’s like an umbrella term. And there’s all these little idiosyncrasies that fit underneath that umbrella. And they can be vast in how they present in in an educational environment. And so we have to be very aware and very careful of what we put under– or what we call dyslexia because it’s such a broad term. And there’s auditory processing, visual processing, ADD, ADHD. There’s all kinds of things that kind of fit under. And sometimes even the vision symptoms can mimic ADD and ADHD symptoms. And so you really have to kind of weed through things to figure out what’s really going on. And like you said, you’re right. You have to be a good observer of your child. You have to watch and ask the right questions and look for those things. But one of the things that we noticed very much so was a working memory issue with some of our kids. That can be very foundational to some of these same struggles going on. If you can’t remember, if it goes in one ear and out the other, which we think that’s a funny little thing that people say, but if you’re trying to educate a child and you can’t get anything to stick, that is so incredibly frustrating for you as the instructor. It is so incredibly frustrating and demoralizing for them as the student. And so we’ve got to look at all the working parts and pieces to figure out exactly what’s going on. And I like to attribute it to doing a puzzle without the box. You have no idea what the final picture is supposed to look like, but you’re trying to figure out what colors go where and what pieces go to make the picture that is your kid. And so the best thing you can do is really study your child.

Gretchen Roe: 00:13:41.717
And one of the things, I think, that is really important is sometimes we think reading is the issue, and it’s not. It’s what they’re hearing. If you can’t hear accurately the fawnings of a word, it’s difficult for you to reproduce that word. And I know I experienced this with one of my own grandchildren. I kept saying to my daughter, “Kayleigh, he can’t hear.” And my daughter said, “Oh, he seems to be fine.” And it wasn’t until his younger sister started to outpace him that Kayleigh realized she needed to figure out some way to assess what she was observing. And the way that she did that was very simple. She took a piece of paper. And she asked Ben and his younger sister, Juliana, to play Simon Says. And as long as she was speaking to them, Ben could play. But as soon as she took the piece of paper and covered her mouth where Ben could no longer read her lips, Ben could no longer play. And it turned out that Ben had fluid on both of his ears and needed tubes. He’s had tubes for 5 years now. He’s 10 years old, and he still has tubes because he’s that one small percentage of kids who when you take the tubes out, he can’t hear anymore. And the most telling situation for them was when he got his first set of tubes, I know my son-in-law, God bless him, was still reluctant, “Did we do the right thing?” And Ben woke up from the surgery. And Chris said to him, “How do you feel, buddy?” And Ben said, “Daddy, I can hear you.” And that’s profound. So if you have a child who, like Amanda says, it doesn’t seem to be processing directions, can’t process multi-step directions, here’s a tip. Your child cannot learn to read until they can hold five bits of information in their head. And what do I mean by that? Until your child can hold a five-digit span – two, eight, seven, three, nine – and repeat those numbers back to you, your child’s not ready to learn to read. And if you have a child who’s 6, 7, 8 years old and can’t do that, you need to look into some possible other organic causes. Kathleen, can you talk about struggling readers and stimuli and how we need to give them the optimal environment for that?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:16:08.934
Sure. So again, with my youngest son, when it was time for school with him, I was using Sunlight, which is a lot of reading– a lot of reading literature. It’s what I used with my oldest. It worked well. I said, “Okay, I’ll use it with my youngest, too.” So I started reading to him. And I’m not kidding when I say he was flying back and forth over the couch. He was climbing up on things. And I was getting frustrated. I said, no, you’re in kindergarten. You have to take this seriously now, it’s school time. And then, eventually I said, “Well, tell me what I said.” And he was able to tell me almost exactly what happened in the chapter. So I realized quickly he can hear me. He still is processing it, but he needs to move. And this is something that he always needed to move. We took it down now, unfortunately, but we had a swing in our homeschool room. And he would swing on the swing as I was reading to him. Or some different things that we were doing, he was moving his body. Just a number of different things that he needed to do. Asking him to sit still in a chair and you have to sit still there, he couldn’t sit still. It wasn’t in him. And he didn’t learn that way. So it was an education for me where once I learned, okay, he can actually move his body while he’s learning. Once I saw the learning was still happening. Rubik’s Cube was the other thing. This is a child who, I mean, he became excellent at Rubik’s Cube, and he could solve it very quickly. But he would sit and do Rubik’s Cube as I was reading to him, as I was going over things with him. And again, I had to keep– because your instinct tells you pay attention. You want to say, pay attention, pay attention. That’s how he needed to pay attention. He needed to be able to be moving his body. And that’s how he focused. That’s how he paid attention. So I needed to– I had to realize as a parent that I had to allow him that opportunity to move his body the way he needed to move his body.

Gretchen Roe: 00:18:29.531
Some of you are sitting here wondering what I’m doing with this giant exercise ball. And some of you would be well served by going and spending 15 bucks at Walmart and getting one of these and allowing your student to sit on it so that they can move. Because believe it or not, that small ancillary movement does help a child to focus in that process. Ladies, we’ve got a list of a lot of things here, and I want to make sure that we go through them. So Kathleen, I want to start with the find the holes. Can you talk about observing and looking for what might be missing?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:19:08.754
Sure. So in that, and again, I keep using my youngest son because he’s the one who I had to identify with. When he wasn’t reading and when he wasn’t picking it up, I had to figure out, well, what is the issue? What is the problem? Now, I never had him tested for anything. I never went and did that. But within my own knowing my child, I was trying to figure out what he did already know and what he didn’t know. Why wasn’t he progressing reading? And what I was able to determine was he could read the CVC words. But when we started adding in vowel, I mean, silent letters, or when we started adding in some of the harder blends, he wasn’t able to read those by continuing to look at, “Well, how come he can read some, and he can’t read the other?” What I realized was, he’s sounding out those CVC words. He’s not reading them, and there is a difference. So that’s where I was realizing that transferring words into long-term memory, it wasn’t happening for him. He wasn’t doing it. He was sounding outwards. And that is a difference. And that is something that you need to recognize. And that is when I really kind of just said, “Okay, I’m going to pull back and just allow this child more time before he’s ready to then move on with the harder words.” He just kept showing me that he just wasn’t ready yet.

Gretchen Roe: 00:20:47.705
And Amanda, I know that you have incorporated Dr. Holinga’s belief in, “You always teach to a child’s strength, not their weakness.” So can you talk about how you have adapted some of your curricula to help a student feel confident, who maybe might not yet be exhibiting confidence?

Amanda Capps: 00:21:08.132
So one of the first things that I would say is, there is never a doubt that these kids are brilliant. While they may struggle in some areas, the intelligence, the way that they think, the thinking outside the box, some of the things that they notice, they may have really amazing situational awareness. They may have really incredible social skills. They may have really incredible artistic skills. And I did want to say when Kathleen was talking about movement, I also want to talk about music. Music, either learning to play an instrument or sometimes, having music in the background that maybe doesn’t have lyrics, can be incredibly helpful to a kid to help maintain focus. So I had a kiddo that didn’t necessarily need to fidget, but she has much more comprehension if there is just music playing in the background, like I said, that doesn’t have any lyrics involved. And so, that is incredibly helpful as well. So look at and explore the different options. And again, look at their strengths. So intelligence is not an issue, but a lot of times, their reading level is much lower than their comprehension, or their ability to absorb what is happening. And so, this is an opportunity for audiobooks that are at that higher level, or finding resources, or reading aloud to your child. And like Kathleen was talking about, all of those are great things. Because you can pull things that are at a much higher level, and it doesn’t discourage or make them feel like, “Oh, wow, we’re just staying kind of stuck in this one level for a long time.” It allows you to kind of up their abilities and to encourage them and for them to feel more confident and successful, without them actually having to physically do the reading themselves.

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:13.425
Right. While the ladies were talking, I pulled these three books off my shelf. You can find them from Rainbow Resources. And one of the things that I have learned about helping a student emerge as a reader is, we assume that all readers emerge the same way. And as you’ve heard each one of our stories, that’s a very different proposition. Now, my son, Duncan, also had some vision issues that needed resolution. We had to work with him on information crossing his corpus callosum. But then, we had to resolve his vision issues. So I want to talk about two things here. The first thing I want to talk about is, and I am enormously indebted to Dr. Karen Holinga, who is a PhD reading specialist, who taught me these three simple books would be a tremendous way to structure an emerging reader program. They are called First Steps, Days Go By, and More Days Go By. And the reason these books are valuable is because they give you as the parent a rich story to read to a student. And I mean rich in the fact that it is adjectives and adverbs and visual language and the ability for a child to frame a story in such a way that they can hear it and imagine. Now, the interesting part about these is there are sections that a student reads back to you that are very simplistic but based on the rich story that you have read to them. And I think that you will find that taking this process and this approach where you read to the student first and then the student reads the same passage of information is tremendously helpful because one of the things that we forget is that as a child emerges as a reader, there’s two skills we’re working on. We’re working on the ability to recognize and comprehend, but we’re also working on the skill of fluency. And that is only developed by a student reading the same materials more than once. And so as your child emerges as a reader, if they seek to read the same book again and again, it’s not that they’re trying to drive you insane. It’s that they are looking for the neurological order that is presented by reading the same content over and over again. One of the things that I want to make sure that we address before we move on is talking about what do you look for to assess if vision is a mitigating factor? None of the three of us are diagnosticians, but we did want to share a link. Here’s some things you can look for. If a student is tilting their head, if you have a student whose behavior changes. They’re amenable, affable, happy to begin school and within an hour, they’re no longer happy. They’re no longer affable. You have a different child sitting next to you or bouncing on the ball or swinging from Kathleen’s swing, there might be a vision issue going on. If they emit small words when they read, if they have difficulty with copy work, if their handwriting slants up the page or down the page, if they have a diminishing attention span. In other words, you have more cooperation at 9:00 than you have at 11:00. All of those things may be indicative of a vision problem. And we would encourage you to find a developmental optician to do some further diagnostics. Now, that’s different from your garden variety optician who prescribes glasses. That’s someone who has had further training and who is looking to explore something called eye teaming. Do your eyes work together as a team the way they’re supposed to? Kids have no lexicon to explain that things aren’t working like they’re supposed to, so they can’t tell you that there is an issue there. Ladies, I’d like to move on to those three important skills that Kathleen defined for us while we were planning this about those three skills that a student needs in order to emerge as a reader. So Kathleen, can you talk about the first one, which is rhyming words?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:27:43.018
Sure. So for rhyming words, this is a skill that’s needed for reading. Children should be able to recognize when words rhyme and when they produce rhyming words and play with rhyming words. They should be able– you want them to be able to hear the similarities in in them. I address this again because my son– because my son struggled with reading and didn’t read till he was eight, didn’t mean I didn’t do anything with him. Even though I said I tried different curriculums, I was always still doing things, not exactly like, “Here’s a curriculum. I’m going to teach you how to read today.” I realized, “Okay. That’s not working.” So then, I would do things like this, play little games with him, do things with rhyming words. We would do things– driving in the car, verbally playing games in that way, just different things to make sure that he was getting this step in the process for reading.

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:44.375
Right. One of the things you can do with them is play a game. Give them a paper bag and say, “I want you to go find five things that begin with the /b/ sound,” and see what they come back with. That might be very– an opportunity for you to really observe to see what’s happening. One of the things that we’ve done as a society is we’ve kicked Mother Goose to the curb. And that’s a shame because Mother Goose gives us an enormous amount of word play in a small number of words. And I would encourage you that if you haven’t thought about your emerging reader reading Mother Goose rhymes to take another look at that because actually, there’s a study out of the University of Brighton in England that says a child who has memorized five nursery rhymes before they begin the process of reading is three times more likely to read on grade level by what the British call the third form or third grade. So I think that’s really important. Amanda, can you talk about syllables and how to help a child discern that, because I know that’s been a challenge in your family with the auditory processing issues.

Amanda Capps: 00:29:55.370
So yeah, so one of the big things or one of the deficits that kids experience a lot of times is phonemic awareness and understanding those things. And so breaking words down and actually hearing all of the sounds or not adding sounds [laughter] to a syllable are really one of those things that can kind of be a clue to you that something else is a little deeper is going on. If you’re noticing consistently that those things are kind of happening – that either they’re omitting sounds or they’re adding sounds, they mispronounce words a lot – those are all things that can kind of clue you in to why they may be having some struggles in fluency because that is going to make anybody choppy. Another thing that happens a lot of times visually is if you’ve got a visual problem going on, you don’t notice punctuation. So you’re not pausing in the right spot. You’re not stopping in the right spot. You’re not putting emphasis in the right places. And that is really going to affect how your child reads aloud and they’re– how well they do. I mean, we all know we’ve purchased that audible book that we’ve listened to and the narrator is terrible. And you can’t focus on what is being read or what the content is because the voice or the way that they talk is so distracting [laughter]. So that can happen with your kiddos, too– I mean, the way you read aloud to them. And you’re right. Mother Goose is huge, Dr. Seuss, I mean, those books are so foundational in the way that they rhyme and the way that they’re set up. We don’t do poetry with kids anymore. We don’t do basic rhymes and setting things to songs as much as we used to because everything now focuses around devices and computers and workbooks and those types of things we’ve kind of lost a lot of that really wonderful foundation building skill sets when we threw that all out the window.

Gretchen Roe: 00:32:14.118
Right. Absolutely. And I said something earlier that I wanted to revisit, which I think is important. If your child can’t catch a ball, you’re not ready to learn to read. Because that eye-hand coordination in those large muscle groups translates for them to be able to track. Can we talk about some of the reading strategies that Kathleen has outlined for us about using a finger or a card and why that’s beneficial?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:32:45.672
Sure. So right, using a finger or a card so that underneath the words to show that you’re reading this word. Now, it’s funny because part of the reason that I even started doing this – I think I even did this with my older son – was because I would sit and read a lot to him. And every once in a while, I’d read a sentence and then I’d have to go back and reread it because I missed a word. I didn’t say a word. And I explained to him that sometimes our eyes move quicker and our brain is processing quicker than our mouth to get the words out. So sometimes we can just skip over a word. So I even taught my oldest son, I’ll use my finger to follow along so that I’m saying all the words because I want to make sure that I’m reading all of them. And it also helps with comprehension, which is something that I also realize that if they’re just reading each word, they’re definitely going to get more out of it. My youngest son, actually, at one point when he was finally learning to read, I had a little index card with a cutout on it. And he was literally reading one word at a time, moving the card along because he needed to just focus on that word at that time. I remember that that is where I needed to start with him. That’s what worked for him, seeing one word and just one word. And he would go through and read the sentence. And then we’d remove the card. And I had to model for him doing it. And then he would go through and then he’d be able to then look at all the words. But there was times he just needed to literally see one word. So that helped him to just, for focus-wise, just pay attention to that one word and let’s read that one word.

Gretchen Roe: 00:34:35.375
I think one of the things that can also be beneficial is particularly, like in Kathleen’s family, she had two boys who were a number of years apart. But for them to be able to each come and say, “Hey, I found a word I don’t know.” Or in Amanda’s family, she could have a wealth of kids who could come to the table and say, “Hey, I found a word I don’t know.” We had a giant dictionary that the salt and sugar and pepper sat on top of in the middle of our table because we had a rule in our household.

Gretchen Roe: 00:35:07.798
And that was you had to come to the dinner table with a word you’d encountered that day that you did not know. And that, I think, in helping kids grow large vocabularies helps them also emerge as readers. Amanda, you mentioned fawnimes. Can you explain in a little bit more depth what that means? Because I think our parents would benefit from having an understanding of that.

Amanda Capps: 00:35:33.080
Right. So we teach phonograms to get kids reading. They are the blends. They are the error of her, the error of nurse, those types of things because there are consistent letter patterns within words that can help us decode what sounds need to happen so that we are reading fluently. And some kids are really going to struggle with that. Again, if they’re not hearing well and they’re not hearing all of those sounds, or if there’s visual confusion going on, and they’re not noticing patterns, part of reading and part of reading successfully is noticing that and is here and here and here and here within a passage. And if it looks like a brand-new word, and you’re basically reading it for the first time every time you see it, you’re never going to get fluent. And so that’s one of the telltale things or one of the things that I noticed with my kiddos, especially the ones with the dyslexic diagnosis is, if it was a word that didn’t have context, it, and, the, be, it, is, were. When you hear those words, you don’t formulate a picture in your mind, do you? You don’t see anything. But the word ambulance, what do you picture? You immediately picture the object, the thing that it is. And so what I was astonished by was sometimes these kids would bust out ambulance or cardiovascular or one of these other big words that had a picture associated with it, but we’re struggling with and, the, and it, and is. And I’m like, “Okay, what is even happening right now?” And so this is one of those things that you may notice as a parent, and you may be racking your brain going, what is going on here? Why do these smaller common words seem to be the real area of struggle, whereas the bigger words are not? And so this is a great opportunity to break words down into parts and into sounds and into sections. I mean, we talk about compound words, when you have something like door knob, door is the word, and then you can add door jamb, door frame. So your door part of the word stays consistent, and you can add all these other endings and recognize that you can make words out of– larger words out of smaller words, just like you can do multistep math problems. And you can take a very basic concept, and you can build, and you can make it ridiculously difficult by the number of operations and the number of steps you’re doing with it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:38:25.259
I think the other thing that’s important for parents to recognize is a lot of reading experiences caught rather than specifically taught. So in Amanda’s family and in my family, we had avid readers that began our journeys and Kathleen’s as well. We all three thought it was easy because those first kids made it look like it was. So when we encountered something different with younger children, we had that older student to model the process of reading. There’s a resource that I think is tremendous, particularly if you have a parent– as a parent, you have a student who is struggling to emerge as a reader. And that is something called Learning Ally. And if you have a child who has a diagnosis of a reading challenge or a suspicion that your pediatrician can verify of a reading challenge, Learning Ally can be a wonderful asset to you. I found it particularly beneficial with my dyslexic son when he hit high school. I didn’t want to read 30 pages of biology every night. But Learning Ally was able to do that for him. Now, Amanda had already alluded to the fact that none of us are interested in an audible book when the narrator is not adept. And I have to say as a disclaimer that all of the people who narrate for Learning Ally are volunteers, and some of them are more adept than others. But just being able to present more than one form of input, being able to have materials read to you as you read along with those materials can be a huge game changer for students. Go to your local library. You can find level one books that have CDs that you can read along with them. You can actually find resources online for Audible components for free. A lot of children’s books are available with an audible component to it that doesn’t require an audible.com subscription. And anywhere that you can have a child read content as it’s being read to them increases their comprehension. I want to turn our attentions now, ladies, to some of the questions that we were asked. And the number one thing was the number one word I actually went and searched through it is how can I instill confidence? How can I create confidence in my student? So I want the two of you to talk about how did you create confidence in your emerging readers? What are some of the things that you said, some of the ways that you modeled? And we’ll start with Kathleen.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:41:22.160
Again, what Amanda said earlier, teaching to his strengths. So for both of my boys, I tried to make sure that I was praising them for what they did well. And I tried to recognize where they were strong and try to use that. Again, with my youngest son, when I realized that he needed to be moving when he was learning, the best thing that I could do was not tell him that that’s not what learning looks like, but allow him to do that. My oldest son, we used to sit at the table. My oldest son got to a point where he said, “Mom, can I just take this in my room and do it? Can I just do my books in my room?” And of course, my first thought was, “No, it’s homeschooling. We’re supposed to all be around the table.” And then I finally said, “Okay, well, he wanted to just go and do his work on his own.” And he would bring it back to me. And everything was done. And then we’d sit and have a discussion. And part of it was his younger brother was jumping all around the room like a monkey.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:42:30.390
And he did tell me afterwards, like I just wanted some peace and quiet, so. But for me, that was part of it, just understanding each child and how they learn, and just being a little bit more flexible and allowing them to learn the way that they need to learn. Again, my youngest, all the way up through, he just graduated as a senior. He was still moving his body about, and he will continue moving his body about when he learns. That’s what he does.

Gretchen Roe: 00:43:02.984
Amanda?

Amanda Capps: 00:43:04.989
Oh, wow. So that is such a great question. So I would say I did a lot of the same things that Kathleen did, but some of it, too, was the curriculums that I picked. You mentioned books with repetition. Five in a row is an amazing curriculum that capitalizes on that. Kids love to read the same story over and over again. And so you do that for five days in a row with the same book. They pick fantastic works of literature. And then they’ve put together this amazing little– you pull this subject out and you pull this subject out, and it might be geography, this, and it might be this craft, and my kids loved five in a row time. It was one of the things they didn’t want to not do on Saturday and Sunday. And so finding things that are geared to the way that they learn and the way that they learn well or the stage that they’re at developmentally is huge to getting their buy-in and their participation and cooperation because we want learning to be fun and we want it to be engaging. The thing that I struggle with the most is just– like Kathleen, I mean, if my kiddo is bouncing off the chair, it’s distracting me. I’m sitting there going, “Oh my gosh, would you just be still and listen to what I’m saying to you?” And yes, it’s getting outside of that, “This has to be the way I want it to look. It has to be structured the way that I want. We’re going to do this my way.” And so I think that– and I mean, if you have eight kids, you literally don’t have a choice but to be flexible. I literally just can’t not be. And so you just kind of have to learn to roll with that. But then look for the wins, look for the victories. Do things that you know are going to really bless that child. I mean, if it’s quality time– I mean, this is where I think love languages really come into play and can be very applicable to a educational environment. Does your kid want you to be there with them? Do they need that connection and that support of you sitting next to them in quality time? Do they need words of affirmation? Do they need you speaking positive and encouraging things over them? Do they like a little gift, a little special goodie, or something that lets you know you were thinking– lets them know you were thinking of them, and that you went out of your way to make that thing happen? Acts of service, do they like you to do things for them? Do they like to see you model things first and model things well for them? Does that really set them up for success? And then touch. Some kids, they want to be right in your lap. They want to be touching you. They want to be right up next to you. And sometimes as a mom, if you’ve got toddlers and you’ve got littles, that can feel a little overwhelming or suffocating at times. And don’t feel bad if it does. But just try to make a hug last for at least 10 to 15 seconds or put your arm next to them, hold their hand while you’re reading out loud to them. Just do those things that foster that connection. And then I think they really are getting what they need out of the experience. And then it engages and helps them to make the learning more worthwhile.

Gretchen Roe: 00:46:23.857
I had a friend that I babysat for for a number of years. Her son did not learn to read until he was 13. But she decided that that would not impede his learning progress. And so she read great works of literature to him. And by the time he was 13, he had read Oliver Twist and Little Women and all of the collected works of Shakespeare. And he hadn’t read any of them. They had all been read to him. Now what was interesting is– I have a tickle in my throat. Excuse me one second. What was interesting is this child did not learn the phonemes. He just one day walked out with Christopher Paolini’s book, which Christopher Paolini in the ’90s was an icon because he was a homeschooled kid who wrote huge novels. And Colin walked out at the age of 13 and said, “Here, Mom, I read this book.” And my friend didn’t actually believe it until she started quizzing him on what he had read. So the important thing I think I want you to take away from that is input is invaluable [inaudible] and Amanda to speak a little bit more about that.

Amanda Capps: 00:47:45.127
Input is really important. I think I had a little bit of an unfair advantage being a second-generation homeschooler. I didn’t have a preconceived idea of what a classroom or structured education needed to look like. It didn’t consist of little hour blocks of time and specific subjects and things like that. And so there was a lot of freedom and flexibility already built into my opinion of what learning was and what it looked like. The other thing too, I think parents get really focused on reading and math and writing, and all of those things are really important and they are worthwhile and we definitely need to be consistent and we need to work on those foundational skills. But there’s so much in your homeschooling experience and in just your life in general that you can count as education that you may not even think of counting. And this is again an area where input and knowing your kid and really knowing what makes them tick, what makes them come alive, what makes them engage looks like. For my oldest daughter, that was classical music. She started playing the cello when she was 4. She added the piano when she was 10. And I mean, that was such an outlet for her, and that was such an area. And so by customizing her educational experience, it allowed for the time and the opportunities for her to really pursue those musical endeavors. My second daughter is very much into the culinary arts. She loves to cook. She aspires to be a traveling personal chef someday. And she loves all things finance. They love games. I mean, anytime you can incorporate things that are benefiting your family but also count for school. She’s been given the opportunity to budget and have the grocery budget and see, okay, how do I make this, how do I make this amount work for a family of 8 or 10 for this amount of meals? I mean, that’s all math. It’s all math. It’s all budgeting. It’s all figuring out those things. And those are real-life skills that are going to take them so much farther than any worksheet or anything that they can do sitting at a table.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:50:12.127
I was going to say that even though my son didn’t read till he was eight, I’m grateful for the time that we had of playing a lot of games and doing arts and crafts and those different things that we did do. And like Gretchen’s friend, I was still reading to him. I had shelves and shelves and shelves of sunlight books. So I said, “Well, the books are here. Even though he’s not reading them on his own, I kept reading them to him.” And he was, it was a thing where he was eight years old. And we were in the car, driving in the car, and I’m driving along with him in the back seat. And he’s reading building signs, street signs, advertising on billboards. And I’m driving thinking, when did this happen? This child couldn’t read. How is he reading billboards? Where all of a sudden he was just ready and it just clicked. And I realized because I had spent all that time reading to him, it’s not like he was so delayed now. And oh my gosh, he’s eight years old and now I have to do kindergarten with curriculum with him because we didn’t do it in kindergarten. And then I’m going to have to do first grade. And he’s going to be behind all the way up through high school. How am I going to– it didn’t work like that. He all of a sudden just quickly just was reading chapter books. He went from one point to all of a sudden being able to read. And by the time he was a senior, he was doing the same thing that other seniors do. It’s not that it set him so far back. And I know that’s part of the mom guilt that we all have. And that is the guilt that I had, which is why I kept– even though I knew better, I kept going out and buying another curriculum when he was six and when he was seven. And I just kept buying another one and buying another one because I had that guilt of how will I ever get him caught up. And the truth is, he was fine. What I was doing with him was fine. We were playing games. We were doing things. We were interacting. We were doing school. If you want to– we were still having that education time. So it didn’t hold him back. He was fine.

Gretchen Roe: 00:52:29.734
Part of my reason for telling about my friend Colin is because I want you to understand that not every student’s journey into reading happens the same way. And literally, Colin never learned Defani. He never learned CVC words. He never learned sight words. But he took Christopher Paolini’s book, which I swear to you is a doorstop. And he read it word for word. And he’d never read a book before that. Now, he was fully 13 years old when he did that. But he had a rich environment that made a difference for him. And there’s one more thing I want to talk about before we conclude with five minutes left. And that is I want your lady’s perspective on what do you do when you have a child who appears to hate school? How do you make the learning happen when they don’t like the process? So Amanda.

Amanda Capps: 00:53:32.941
So this is where conversations have to happen, and we have to talk about character, and we have to talk about attitudes. Because, I mean, let’s be real, there are certain things as adults we don’t like to do. I don’t like to balance my checkbook. I don’t like washing dishes. I don’t like folding laundry. I mean, there are definitely tasks that I have to do on a daily or a weekly or a monthly basis that are not my favorite. But they can’t just be ignored. They can’t just not be done. And they have to be done. And I have the choice of my attitude in how I approach them. And I can make it more fun by putting on Netflix and watching a show while I fold laundry, or I can put in earbuds, and I can listen to a book while I wash dishes. I mean, there are options, there are avenues, there are things that we can do. But I tell people and my kids especially probably feel like I sound like a broken record. Your attitude is everything in how you approach life. And so change is inevitable, but attitude is optional. And you have to embrace the change, and you have to– growth can be painful.

Amanda Capps: 00:54:49.737
How many of us have had kids who’ve experienced groin pains in their legs, and we’re giving them magnesium, or we’re rubbing magnesium oil into their little muscles, and they’re hurting because they’re growing, but the growth on the back end of that, they’re running faster, they’re taller, they’re able to do more things. I can still remember my daughter being over the moon when she was finally tall enough to ride the ride at Silver Dollar City that all of her older siblings could get right on because they were tall enough. But she wasn’t for a certain period of time. And then eventually, we go, she stands up, her head’s at the line, and suddenly, a whole new level of riding rides is open to her. And so I think if you can paint that picture of look at what the pain can– and I mean, I should know, I’ve given birth to eight children. I know what pain can do and what it can produce. And it can produce amazing and wonderful people and wonderful experiences and an incredibly rich life.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:55:52.320
And it’s the buy-in too. That’s the one where I believe– and again, my oldest son would anything I put in front of him. Okay. And he would whatever I asked him asked him to do, education-wise, he would do it. My youngest son, very quickly along, would say, “Why? Why do I need to learn this? Why?” And it became a thing with everything I asked him to do. Why? So I learned quickly that I better know the why before I said to him, “Oh, we’re going to do this. We’re going to make a volcano.” Why? I needed to know the why first because he asked every time. Now, I will say– and I know Amanda agrees with me on this one. There are some things with– this is part of your education. And you are going to learn algebra. Yes, you are, because it’s important in life. And maybe you don’t understand that right now, but you’re going to learn algebra. Yep. So you need to have the buy-in, but sometimes there also needs to be– and I’ve related it to driving. I will tell my kids, my youngest son when he’s always asking the why, “Well, it’s like when we drive outside that sometimes– well, why do I have to stick to the right side of the road? Because that’s the rules. Why do I have to stop at a red light? Because that’s the rule. Because that is how society functions. And if you want to be able to function as an adult in this society, there are certain things you have to learn. So, okay, you don’t like this science curriculum? Let’s see what science curriculum you do like, but you will be doing a science curriculum.” So that’s that compromise with the buy-in that I made sure that, “Okay, I’m listening to you. I want you to want to do this, but we’re going to have a compromise here where you will be doing some science. So let’s figure it out.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:57:54.590
I think one of the hardest things for me was to learn that my kids could be excellent collaborators with me as far as the decision-making process was concerned. And Kathleen and Amanda have both hit on that. If you have a child who’s giving you pushback, it’s time to sit down and have an honest conversation and figure out why. And just as Kathleen has said she had to have the answer to why ready, maybe you don’t know why. And so it’s time to seek their counsel. And sometimes you’d be amazed at the things you’ll learn from asking your children questions. I mentioned Dr. Karen Holinga earlier, and she taught me a very valuable lesson. And that is, she said, “No child doesn’t want to learn.” Let me rephrase that. Every child wants to learn, but perhaps they have things that are impeding their learning or things that they think should go differently. And so being able to collaborate with them to figure out how their learning can progress the best is a wonderful and rewarding experience. So we would like to encourage you toward that end. One of the things that we have tangentially talked about throughout this conversation is our Spelling You See curriculum. Spelling You See incorporates many of the things that we have talked about, that skill of fluency, that ability that Amanda talked about of five in a row, of learning to read the same passage multiple times. Those are features that Dr. Holinga incorporated in the development of Spelling You See. And it can be a game changer for an emerging reader to help them develop that skill of fluency as they learn to spell. Reading skill and spelling skill are entirely different skills. And as parents, we sometimes assume that they’re co-mingled. They’re not. They’re actually opposite. So if you have questions about that, we’d encourage you to reach out to folks like Kathleen and Amanda at the company who can help you. We want to thank you all for joining us today. And I’m going to leave the last two minutes, one each for Amanda and Kathleen to give you their best piece of advice as your students emerge as readers. So since we started the day with Amanda, Kathleen, I’ll let you go first. And, Amanda, I’ll leave you with the last word.

Kathleen Calabrese: 01:00:16.023
I would just say have those conversations with your child, even little, even at five years old when you’re first trying to teach them to read. Like Amanda said, what do you see when you’re looking at the page? Do they see punctuation? Are the words moving? Just the different things. But really just try to pay attention to that individual child. Again, I thought that teaching a child to read was easy until I had my second and I realized, “Okay, every child learns differently. Literally, every child learns differently.” And then I would just say as a parent, have patience, just have patience. Again, my child didn’t learn to read till he’s eight, and he’s 18 years old now, and he can read anything. He’s perfectly fine. It did not mess up his whole life. He’s fine, and your child will be too.

Amanda Capps: 01:01:16.604
I would just love to say a couple of things that we didn’t get a chance to hit on. One of the very big symptoms for us was car sickness. So if you have a kiddo that struggles with getting car sick, or they need to have sunglasses, or wear a hat because the light bothers them, those are huge indicators. Tracking has been a thing for several of my kids. Taking something simple like a pencil, having them focus on the eraser, and moving it and seeing if they’re moving their head, if their eyes are jerking as they’re trying to follow that and track, then that’s all happening when they’re trying to read. And that can be so incredibly frustrating and causing so much visual confusion for them.

Amanda Capps: 01:02:04.711
The other thing that I think is a huge thing to keep in mind is I did vision therapy with my daughter, my first daughter at seven. My second daughter, I knew what to look for a little sooner. So she went through vision therapy at six and my son. And then I found she regressed when she hit puberty. And I was like, “What is going on? We were making so much progress. Everything was going so well.” And I found out that that can actually happen. And so if you’re seeing that happen, like maybe you did some things and things were going really well and you were seeing some progress and things like that, and then they kind of hit that puberty age and they start going through all the body changes, it can affect their eyes again. And so it’s always worth getting that checked out.

Amanda Capps: 01:02:49.662
And I would just say as a parent, trust your gut. If you think something is up and something is going on, it probably is. And so don’t hesitate to follow that gut instinct and to change things up if you need to. Look for testing if you need to. Look for therapies if you need to. There’s a wealth of information out there. Find other moms who are farther in the journey than you are and ask them to help you. Ask them what they did. Ask them for resources and referrals. They’re happy to help. We are all in this journey together and we each other are our best allies and we’re all in it to have everyone be successful.

Gretchen Roe: 01:03:30.843
Absolutely. And if after having watched this today and you are looking for further guidance, you can certainly reach out to any of us here at Demme Learning. You can give our 800 number a call, 888-854-6284. You can live chat us through our website. You can send us an email. We’re here to help you be successful. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. Thanks for joining us. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or go on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it.

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