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Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:00:00.206
We start copy work always even before reading, we kind of got it backwards all these many years and we teach them how to read first and then jump into actually writing. The handwriting, the kinesthetic component, all that happens in the cerebellum part of the brain. All of that happens first. So very important to get that handwriting going.

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:27.012
Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show, and I am so excited today to welcome my most esteemed colleague and friend, Dr. Karen Holinga. We have known each other now for 10 years. And 10 years ago, I had the privilege of picking Dr. Holinga up as she was a speaker at a homeschool conference. And it was a friendship made in heaven, so to speak. I’ve enjoyed her company many times over the years, but what I particularly enjoyed is the fact that she has a passion for children who want to read, who want to understand the process of reading.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:01:05.782
Okay, thanks for having me. This is so fun. I’m in Florida right now, by the way. My husband and I stole a week away. We live in Columbus, Ohio, but we’re here. So I’m on my porch. We homeschooled our three kids for 12 years and we started out for spiritual reasons and just wanted to homeschool. And we ended up homeschooling because I had a daughter that couldn’t read when she was in third grade and we really, really struggled. And sometimes when I talk about it, I tell people how I cried myself to sleep for three years because I couldn’t figure out how to help her. And my husband would say things to me like, “Karen, she’s got a mind like a steel trap. How come this is the one thing we can’t teach her?” And I go, “I don’t know.” So anyway, it had a happy ending. She’s a physician now. But wow, you never forget those times. And I think it’s something that I always wanted, to help kids learn how to read. I always wanted to be a reading teacher, but boy, when God gave me one, that made it even closer to home. So I appreciate this opportunity to talk and to share.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:13.035
And I think this is something– this is a question I get asked at every conference I attend. At what age should my child be reading? And, Karen, you said when we were having our planning session that kids walk at 9 months and 19 months. And so I’d like you to talk a little bit about that because we put an enormous amount of pressure on these kids.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:02:33.707
We sure do. So it’s kind of a dichotomy because we have early readers and late readers, but you have early talkers and early walkers or all that. So children do walk at the age of 9 months and sometimes they don’t walk till 19 months. And keep in mind that that is not correlated to IQ. There’s a huge readiness issue. So that’s really important. I guess the other side of the coin is, though, that if you have a third grader that’s not reading, research is telling us that you only have a one in four chance of ever getting them actually caught up. Now, can we do it? Yes, I do it all the time. I have a very busy little reading clinic. I see 1,500 kids a year. I’ve done this for years and we get them up to speed, but it is really difficult. So the optimal time to teach a child how to read is between six and eight. So they should be making moves forward by the time they’re five and a half or six.

Gretchen Roe: 00:03:26.119
One of the things that you had asked me to present was the radiography photo that shows the difference between a 4-year-old and a 10-year-old. And I think that helps us frame our discussion a little bit.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:03:42.560
This X-ray that you’re going to put up is a 4-year-old’s hand and a 10-year-old’s hand. And the 4-year-old hand doesn’t even have any cartilage in it yet, so you have to be careful about how much you ask. And that’s why coloring and that kind of thing is really helpful and important for children.

Gretchen Roe: 00:03:59.464
The 4-year-old is on the left. The 10-year-old is on the right. And I think the important thing for parents to understand is sometimes we have expectations of four, five, six-year-olds that they can’t deliver on because their bones in their hands are literally not yet developed.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:04:17.144
So readiness, one of the readiness things though, coincidentally, I mean, kind of in correlation with this, this is all kind of– you have to be very cognizant of where your child is along the developmental scale. But nursery rhymes are very important. They need to be able to hear rhymes. Jack and Jill went up the– that kind of thing. Clapping in syllables is really important, like we do in Jack and Jill. Kindergarten teachers spend the whole year getting kids shifted over from capital letters to lowercase letters in kindergarten. And so that’s the other thing that we really work on. All those lowercase letters should be top-down, single space, single stroke. If you do that, that almost eliminates the possibility of them doing too many backwards letters because you do a B from the top down, like an H and a C would be with that C stroke, and then up-down for D. Counting to 100 by ones, counting to 100 by 10s, by 5s, is really helpful and important.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:05:19.290
And then being able to get that critical sound to letter correspondence that– we do letter boxes, and listen, and write, and Spelling You See, so that if they’ve got a three-letter word like, I don’t know, “big” they’re going “buh, i, guh,” and they say the sound, not the letter name because the brain is much more responsive to that. And if they say it orally, that gives them what we refer to as a double feed. They go “buh”– so making it multimodality as much as possible. They hear it, see it, say it, and then write it. Everything happens kinesthetically first. So that’s always the way in.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:54.357
But Karen, you said something just as we were getting ready to start today that I hadn’t really thought about, which is millennials don’t even recognize nursery rhymes.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:06:03.394
I have so many millennials. My girls are millennials and we don’t even teach nursery rhymes anymore, and it’s too bad. We really should do it. And that was one of the– I mean, that was one of the many reasons we did nursery rhymes in Jack and Jill. But that ability to rhyme and to be able to clap and hear rhythms is just a critical reading readiness activity.

Gretchen Roe: 00:06:26.217
Well, I remember vividly when I was asked 10 years ago to put a presentation together about Spelling You See, and one of the things I found was a study out of the University of Brighton in England that said that a child who had memorized five nursery rhymes before they began the process of reading was twice as likely to read on grade level by third grade. And I think that makes a difference.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:06:47.646
That makes a difference. And I think probably many of those kids had been read to a lot. I mean, just you can’t overstate how helpful it is to let your kids hear you read. And I always recommend that all kids even have a listening device, that they’re listening to good stories all the time. And keep them off the screens because there is absolutely a correlation between too much screen activity and not strong academics.

Gretchen Roe: 00:07:13.415
Right. Well, one of the challenges with that, and we’re going to talk about this in more depth a little bit later, but when they start screen time too soon, it overdevelops their central detail vision and doesn’t allow their peripheral vision to develop accurately. And so that impedes the progress of learning to read because you need both together, correct?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:07:34.032
Yep. Absolutely. 100%. Yeah.

Gretchen Roe: 00:07:36.751
So tell me a little bit about why parents reading to children is so critical.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:07:45.022
Well, it enhances their vocabulary. It gives you an opportunity to discuss concepts. A lot of children don’t understand that when they read, it’s telling a story, and to pay attention to detail. So even just having that conversation and then showing them how print works in our language. Because Hebrew goes this way and Chinese goes up and down, and English goes left to right, top down. A lot of those are all pre-reading skills. And so getting your finger in there occasionally and following the lines and then that critical return sweep and all of all that positional stuff and giving them literacy language like point to a capital letter on the page. Point to a lowercase letter. Find the period. Find the question mark. All of that, that literacy language is so important.

Gretchen Roe: 00:08:36.587
I read to my kids all the time, but I don’t think I did that with my kids.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:08:41.223
And I think we just do it– well, we didn’t do that specifically, but we really do a lot of things naturally that we’re just not cognizant of. And then when they start to write– that’s the other thing is that’s when that critical left to right happens too, and that they have to put spaces between the words, and they know the difference between what a letter is and what a word is. We start copy work always even before reading. We kind of got it backwards all these many years, and we teach them how to read first, and then jump into actually writing. The handwriting, the kinesthetic component, all that happens in the cerebellum part of the brain. All of that happens first. So very important to get that handwriting going.

Gretchen Roe: 00:09:26.328
And so one of the things that we talked about when we planned for this was the fact that boys are so reluctant to pick up one of these or one of these, a pen or a pencil. So how do we get boys to do that?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:09:42.898
Well, keep it short, make it interesting, change up the activity really fast. The research is telling us that you have their age plus two minutes to really have a focused attention span. So if you’re dealing with a six-year-old, you’ve got eight minutes, and if you just stay at the table, and you’re longer than that, you’re really shooting yourself in the foot, then you’re going to have all kinds of neurological angst.

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:09.128
So would it be easier– and do you count that being read too as teaching reading?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:10:16.082
No, not being read too. But when you’ve got a really focused math or activity, or you’re working on handwriting, that that period of concentration is very limited.

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:26.434
Okay, okay. And you had also said that girls develop differently than boys. And in the ages from one to five, usually quicker than boys. So it makes sense that boys are so busy on those large muscle groups that they’re not really ready to sit still and learn to read.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:10:49.195
They’re really not. And you really want to use a varied approach. I mean, you really want to change it up, do things differently, and everything gross motor. Do your letters in whipped cream, or out in the snow. Have fun.

Gretchen Roe: 00:11:03.448
Sure. In the sand. I remember going out and getting a bag of play sand from Michael’s and bringing it home, and put it on a cookie sheet so my kids could draw letters in it. So it’s really good. So why is it that children typically start with capital letters?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:11:23.841
Because those big block letters are much easier, easier to form. And I think all of us as parents, we always teach them that first. But that’s a really important thing, teaching them their name first. And that’s a perfect segue. When I was teaching kindergarten, we’d always start with their names, and we’d work on that probably for a month or two and start with a capital. And that’s when a lot of that vocabulary starts too.

Gretchen Roe: 00:11:46.448
Okay. And so if I am a parent who has a child who doesn’t want to hold a writing implement, how can I encourage them to do that? I know you have these conversations with your clients, so.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:12:02.825
How do we encourage them to do it? [laughter] That tripod grip is really important, and it is worth working on. Children that have auditory processing delays, speech problems, the research is really interesting. We’re not really sure why, but children that have trouble holding their pencils also are speaking and articulating letters and sounds clearly often have trouble holding their pencils as well properly. But it’s a hill worth dying on. But you really have a window. If they’re holding it wrong and they’re seven and a half or eight, the research is telling us don’t don’t go there. But if it’s before then, otherwise they start cramping, and it’s harder to write when you’re holding it wrong. But a lot of kids have that issue that have speech problems. That’s something just to keep in mind.

Gretchen Roe: 00:12:54.965
Interesting. I remember you telling me this 10 years ago that it took half as much neurological energy to make a letter from the top down as it did from the bottom up. And my boys were bottom uppers. They made those letters from the bottom to the top. And it was a hill that based on your conversation with my youngest, I fought to get him to do those letters top down because there’s a degree of fluidity there, right?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:13:23.078
Yeah. Well, the other thing is that children that do from the bottom up frequently have vision issues. That’s one of the very first flags that I notice when I’m in the office doing assessing, and they do that because they can find the line. So that’s something that I always take a look at, and you want to be cognizant of that. You definitely want them to start top down, but that could be an indicator of them having difficulty visually. If kids are doing a lot of backwards letters, that’s not dyslexia, okay? That’s vision. So the medical definition of dyslexia is the inability to make a sound-letter match or an inability to rhyme and difficulty with clapping. They’ll say something like computer instead of computer. All of those things, speech and difficulty holding a pencil, all go under. That’s the auditory processing component. But if they’re doing backwards letters or they’re having trouble staying on a line or they need a finger to read or they can’t develop what we refer to as a visual memory, if spelling is excruciatingly difficult for them, if it’s not sound letter, then that’s vision.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:14:33.010
And we figured that there’s probably three or four kids per first grade classroom that are delayed with auditory processing, which eventually catches up, but a lot of times not till about the age of nine. And then again, there’s another jump till about 13 but– I lost my train of thought. Oh, and three or four kids per classroom that have undiagnosed vision going on. So and then if probably two or three maybe that have kind of both, those numbers are kind of– but that’s kind of the ballpark. So you really want to be watching those kids around the age of six and see what’s going on if they’re really struggling.

Gretchen Roe: 00:15:10.513
One of the things for me was that hair-triggered temper because I had two kids with vision issues and seeing a child who marshaled all their energies and held it together, held it together, and then lost it. Both of those kids in my family turned out to have undiagnosed vision issues.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:15:31.584
Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that. That’s true.

Gretchen Roe: 00:15:33.801
You said something, I think, that is important for us to address, don’t assume kids don’t want to read. So can you talk in a little bit more depth about that?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:15:47.730
Well, if you’re having tears or hair-triggered tempers, that kind of thing, kids don’t want to be there any more than you do and probably less. And they really do want to please their parents. And they really do want to learn. That just made us wanting to learn. So if they’re really resistant, that’s really something to not– I really pushed my own daughter because I knew how smart– she was smart and she’d been read to from the womb. And I knew she wanted to learn how to read like her siblings. But boy, there was something going on and I said, “You know, you’re going to do this and how come you know it today, but then they don’t know it the next day when you’re having all of that?” And instead of really pushing back, it’s better to take a step back and just try to really see what’s going on and then make some phone calls and talk to some people. Don’t push a young child because more often than not, there is something going on and they can’t tell you. They don’t know if it’s vision because whatever they see is normal for them.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:53.335
Right. So I have two questions toward that, Karen. The first one is my child, when writing writes from the bottom up. Should I worry about this? She’s six.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:17:04.050
Well, no, you don’t have to worry right now, but you really do make need to make a concerted effort to get that top down single stroke going because it makes a huge difference down the pike for learning cursive and for writing rapidly and for all that muscle control. It’s between the ages of– up to seven, seven and a half, it’s a hill worth dying on. But but if they’re really resistant, that’s an indicator of vision.

Gretchen Roe: 00:17:33.874
Okay And so then the question that Debbie asked to follow on to that is, what does vision mean and what as an issue and how would you correct it?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:17:44.162
Okay, so what happens is that– I would say that I see hundreds and hundreds of kids every year. What happens is that almost without exception, all the children that come to me have been to a pediatrician and they have had some sort of visual exam. And when they do a routine eye exam, they do everything distancing close with each eye separately. And it’s only like the last 30 or 45 seconds that they lift all the flaps and they’ll say to the child, “Okay, read the wall chart or read what’s close.” Well, for 20 or 30 seconds, they can hold it and they can make both of their eyes look at that image. But the problem is that if the alignment between the two eyes is off by even a hair’s breath, either horizontally or vertically, your brain will see double and your brain will turn itself into a pretzel to keep itself from seeing double because if it sees double, you’re going to get a cortisol release and then you’re going to get all sorts of bad chemicals.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:18:46.000
So what happens is that the brain will either suppress an eye or something, or they’ll alternate eyes. Something’s going to happen. But it’s an alignment issue. That’s kind of the keyword you want to use. And then what they do a lot of times is you’ll create a focusing problem, which is referred to as accommodation because their eyes are working so hard just to keep the print clear. And a lot of times these kids are fine when you’re in kindergarten or early first grade because the print is so big and the words are further apart and there’s a lot of space between the lines. But as that font continues to decrease in size and the words and letters get closer together, then there starts to be resistance and they can’t accommodate for that. One of the ways to figure out if you’ve got your– if your child is reading, as that font size diminishes, as they start to push back, that’s a huge flag for vision. Try to make that print big on a Kindle or something and just see if they’re good with that. And that’ll help you tease it out a little bit.

Gretchen Roe: 00:19:51.871
And if a parent suspects that there’s a challenge, they need to find a developmental optometrist.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:19:59.009
Yes, not an ophthalmologist because an ophthalmologist is a real doctor. They’re surgeons. And the first thing they’re going to do is dilate and make sure your child’s eye is healthy, which is a good exam. And then they’re going to make sure that your child is not a candidate for surgery. But what they will frequently tell you is that your child’s eyes are within normal parameters. The problem with that is that young children have– their farsightedness is much stronger initially. And when you’re trying to teach them how to read close-ups, that’s a big problem. And those kids need usually need glasses for a year or two until their eyeballs kind of catch up and resolve that. But you want to go to a developmental optometrist who is a refractive specialist and ask them about alignment between the two eyes. Make sure they take measurements this way and this way so that you can be sure that your child is getting a single image.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:20:54.582
The other thing is that these kids are super smart and they’ll do– those muscles are pliable and the brain will do anything it can to accommodate for that print. So you have to get a baseline of all the measurements for far sight, near sight, and astigmatism. But then you have to do what we refer to as a heavy dilation, wait 20 minutes and then take all new measurements on those muscles when they’re completely relaxed after the dilation. And that will tell you– that tells the doctor right away how hard that child has to work or what that child has to do to accommodate to pull those muscles up into the appropriate parallel position to keep the print clear. And you really need that kind of an exam because if you don’t, your child is not going to look like anything’s going on and they’re not going to think there is and it’s going to be–

Gretchen Roe: 00:21:48.524
And they don’t have– like you’ve already said, they don’t have the vocabulary to say, “Mom, the words wiggle on the paper,” because they assume the words wiggle on the paper for us as well. The other thing that you can say is refer to as an eye teaming issue. Do the eyes team together the way they’re supposed to on the kid?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:22:07.752
Exactly right. And keep in mind that these kids have 20/20 vision when it’s one eye by itself. The problem is the teaming. That’s the critical thing. And we really, we have trouble finding good optometrists that will treat that. The girl that I use in Columbus, Ohio, three or four vision therapy sessions for a lot of times if the vision is going out is good to go. And she lets the parents do the therapy at home and we go in every couple of weeks for checkups and she can get them up and running. Sometimes if it’s convergence access, they’re pulling in, then what they do is they they put the lenses and the glasses to get their eyes in parallel position to reduce the fatigue. And that actually does the therapy for you. And after a year, they don’t even need those glasses anymore. But there’s ways to fix that that don’t have to do with prescription necessarily.

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:00.088
I know. My eldest daughter is– eldest daughter, middle daughter is 33 years old and she’s a research biologist. I mean, she’s looking at print all the time, but she struggled with migraines. It turned out that her eyes did not team together. They were on two separate planes. So she ended up with a pair of prism glasses that brought those eyes together to team appropriately. And it reduced the number of migraines by half for her. So it does truly make a difference. You said that you had grouped the questions that parents had sent us together and you had some observations about boys and readings.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:23:44.471
Yeah. A lot of questions about boy. All right.

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:48.467
I’m going to let you just go there. How’s that?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:23:50.445
Keep it short. Keep it varied. Grab them for five-minute periods at a time. I made some notes here. Teach to context. It’s got to be interesting [prestine?]. I mean, it’s just boys don’t give you a lot of grace. It’s got to be interesting. So find some short, cute little passages about trucks. Use vocabulary that’s familiar to them. Don’t make it hard or clever. Just make it easy. I use a lot of storybooks. I like some of those Dr. Seuss books and that kind of thing, but make sure you’re telling a story. And I read everything to my kids first because more than half the words are not phonetic. And if it if it sounds too contrived, they get frustrated really fast.

Gretchen Roe: 00:24:35.170
And I think this is one of the things that you taught me that I have found so valuable over the years is you say that when a parent is teaching a child to read, to always read what they’re being asked to read to them first and then ask them to read it.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:24:48.744
Yeah, for sure.

Gretchen Roe: 00:24:50.218
So can you give our parents some insight into why you would want to do that? Because I’ve actually had parents say to me, “Well, gee, that seems like we’re cheating.”

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:24:59.383
Okay. Well, the problem is that even right out of the shoot, the most common words in the English language, depending on which word list you’re looking at, but 40 or 50% of those words can be non-phonetic. The their, they’re, and there and two, to, and too and all of those words are not words that you can phonetically sound out. So it’s super frustrating because kids do learn what we teach. But just because you have two vowels sitting next to each other, you’re going to have words like head that the first vowel isn’t long, and the second one’s silent. The problem is that there are so many exceptions to all the rules and we have so many silent letters in our language. And so many of those connector words are just not predictable at all. So I always read everything to kids first because what the research is telling us is if they see those non-phonetic words embedded in a meaningful context, by the third time or so that the brain sees those words, it will throw it into long-term memory in a place that you can actually retrieve it. It won’t just be rote memorized.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:26:06.595
And the bottom line is you just kind of have to– you have to have a visual memory. You have to memorize a lot of words. You just have to know them but context is the carrier. And that was one of the big new research findings in the last 10 or 15 years is that English is so diverse and comes from so many different languages that they know now that context is the carrier. So you have to give kids a lot of grace. I just read it to them. I have them read the same story maybe a couple days in a row and they’re good to go. They’ve got the vocabulary and they’re up and running. And then you plug them into spelling you see and we show them the patterns like the EE and the EA and the tricky Y guy. And then when the brain sees those non-phonetic words embedded in a meaningful context via copywork and dictation, that’s how the brain learns how to spell all those irregular words that our language has so many of.

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:02.115
Right. Which can be even the best of readers can be frustrated spellers because so much of what we read is not spelled like it should be.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:27:11.983
No. I mean, it’s just not and it’s really frustrating. It’s just frustrating. Yeah.

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:18.953
So Karen, there was a question here that said what assessment tools should be used to determine reading readiness. And I’m not really sure that it’s a tool so much as a process. I wonder if you could–

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:27:31.024
I think —

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:32.748
We’ve talked about it here, but can you elaborate a little bit on that? Because I know as parents, we’re in a results-oriented society. So give me something that’s going to give me an evaluation and tell me what I need to do.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:27:42.107
I don’t know. They like to be read to. They can tell you a story back. They can hold a pencil. Boy, readiness is really hard. It’s almost like an interest level. Right? It’s just, I don’t know.

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:57.922
I spoke with a parent at a conference this weekend and he said he was absolutely frustrated with his daughter because every time he went to read to her, she’d walk off on him.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:28:10.358
How old was she?

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:11.832
Well, that was the question I asked. I said, “So how old is she?” And he says, “Two.” I started laughing, and I said, “But that’s a two-year-old’s nature. She’s not ready to do that yet.”

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:28:24.615
Get nursery rhymes and act them out, right? I don’t know. Yeah. Between six and eight, you really need to start making it happen in some way, but readiness. I, you know, when I taught kindergarten, I remember one year I had six little boys that all they wanted to do was be back on the carpet playing with their trucks going room, room, room. And I remember asking one family to please hold their child one more year. And the dad said, “What do you mean flunk kindergarten?” And I said, “He’s just not ready,” because a lot of those little girls come in – they’re five and a half or six – with hands on the hips and they say, “Teach me how to read.” And there’s a huge difference, a lot of times, between five- and six-year-olds. And you know what? They did let me hold him. And the next year he was the top of the class. He was ready. But sometimes, they’re just not there.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:13.570
But Karen, how do we do this because we have so much societal pressure to happen for kids?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:29:20.726
I know, but the problem is that you can do real neurological damage. And I always tell people, I would rather 1000 times have a child that can’t read than a kid that thinks he can’t read. And if you set that up in some sort of an environment where there’s a lot of scolding or that kind of thing, you’re getting a lot of cortisol and bad brain stuff. Don’t push.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:50.076
Can you– because you’ve mentioned cortisol twice? And I know where you’re going with this because we’ve had these conversations for eons. But can you explain why the presence of cortisol interrupts the process of learning no matter what?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:30:04.916
Okay, well, so what happens is that– okay, so my apology to real doctors out there, this is the literacy version of what happens neurologically, but you have a reticular activating system, which is at the top of the spinal column and at the base of the brainstem. I haven’t talked about this for a while. And it’s supposed to stay open for lots of information going through all the time. And it is the fight-or-flight mechanism of the brain. And apparently, the way God has set that up is if it feels threatened or overloaded in any way, that reticular activating system – we refer to it as the RAS, the RAS; you can look it up on the internet – it will shut down. And if that happens, then it’s– kind of when the kids get glassy or they start pushing back, if that happens, you’ve just got to shut it down. You’ve got to stop your instructional session before that happens, because once they’re down for the count, that that is just over and it’s going to be done for a while. Assuming you can get the information through the reticular activating system, it heads for the active working memory, which is the hippocampus. And that’s where that’s where all the processing goes.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:31:19.538
There is no long-term memory in the hippocampus, but the information that lands there simmers for a period of time until the brain can find the connection or the links that it needs to get up into long-term memory. And so that’s what you want to happen. But the problem with the hippocampus is that we have something called the amygdala. So what happens is that is the emotional center of the brain and it acts like a screen. It’s called a screen. And all the information that comes through the reticular activating system goes through this amygdala into the hippocampus. And if that if the amygdala, the emotional center, gets upset and it can be upset because the kids are going to Disneyland with grandma on Saturday or it can be upset because they they know that their baseball went through a glass and broke the window and the neighbors are going to be upset. But if there is any kind of an emotional response or they’ve been here yesterday, they didn’t like this story or something negative happened when you were talking to them about math 10 minutes ago. They’re going to be– that amygdala fills up with chemicals and actually blocks all the information from going into the hippocampus.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:32:36.672
And again, you’re just at a standstill at that point and it’s it’s associated with tummy aches and headaches and all kinds of. There’s always a physiological response to something that’s happening neurologically. So if you’re getting any kind of upset, I mean, you just have to do everything you can to keep that from happening. But that’s a problem. And so it’s that readiness factor when we talk about that you can push to a point, but then you want to back off and you want to be kind of– you want to navigate this with a little kid because they can’t navigate it themselves.

Gretchen Roe: 00:33:18.097
I think one of the things that’s hard is we tend to see it happening in other families. If it’s not happening in ours, then we think it’s something we’ve done and we forget that the kids walk between nine months and 18 months and we forget to be able to give that grace of just waiting a little bit longer. And you talk often, as I’ve heard you speak from stage about the value of input. Just keep reading to them, keep giving them input. And eventually their cup is full and they’re ready to give you.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:33:57.377
Yeah. I think with those listening devices, I mean, I don’t think they should be listening to twaddle. But I think that you can give them– I mean, I don’t think fairy tales are twaddle. I mean, I think there’s a lot of really good stuff out there, but I really think that you can get almost as big a neurological hit from a good story that they’re hearing as you can when you’re coddling them in your arms and giving them their good night kisses at night. But really keeping them away from screens, away from from all of that and just inundating them, immersing them in language. That’s always the thing you want to do. Lots of stories, lots of artwork, lots of hands-on stuff, lots of outside play. The optometrist that I work with wants them to have as much time outside or more than even screen time because there’s a real epidemic now of nearsightedness that’s becoming really significant because the kids are on devices so much of the time.

Gretchen Roe: 00:35:00.514
One of the other things I think that’s really important to understand, I have a daughter-in-law who’s an occupational therapist and she says, if you have a child who’s really struggling with pencil grip and holding things, if they can’t catch a ball–

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:35:14.293
Oh, wow.

Gretchen Roe: 00:35:15.380
If they can’t catch a ball, they can’t hold a pencil. And if they can’t do a sit up, holding a pencil is even harder because we don’t recognize how much core strength is part of the process to help us be able to write. So there’s those large muscle groups feed into those small muscle groups. They’re not separate in the lease. Karen, can you talk a little bit about kids with special needs or kids who already have a greater lift to get to the process of reading? We had a couple of parents ask those questions and I wondered if you, what approach would you take that’s different? And I know the answer here, but I want to hear you say it for the recording.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:35:59.132
Okay. Well, one of the things that I see in my office a lot besides the vision is delays in auditory processing. And what happens is that auditory processing is the terminology that we use for late language development. So that’s neurologically based. Vision is physical. Vision is the eye muscles that are weak, that are not working well together. Okay, so I’m just going to backtrack a little bit because the difference in these two areas is really important. So with vision, what happens is that the eye muscles in– a lot of kids that are late bloomers or kids on the spectrum have globally low muscle tone. And so that always almost inevitably affects the vision. And so what happens is that the visual weakness creates neurological fatigue and neurological confusion, both of those things. When kids come in that have undiagnosed vision, the parents will be complaining about comprehension problems. And the assumption there is that something is rooted in the neurology, but in fact, it is the input of the vision that’s creating the neurological confusion and neurological weakness.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:37:12.167
Okay, so that aside. Then the next big group that I see is kids that have language development, which is auditory processing. So that can be show itself in expressive or receptive language and it can be with speech and it can be holding a pencil, those muscle groups. Those kids process language a lot more slowly. They have a lot of difficulty with rhyming, with sound-to-letter correspondence. We talked about that a little bit before. So what you have to do with those kids is you have to talk slower, not louder, and you have to give them one direction at a time. They can’t do two or three things. If you say, “Go to your room, get your shoes, meet me at the front door. We’re leaving at 5:00,” they’ll either show up at the door with no shoes or they’ll go to their bedroom and they can’t remember what they got there for.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:38:12.761
So a lot of those kids are misdiagnosed as being on the spectrum and they’re also misdiagnosed as being ADD or ADHD. And they’re neither of those things. I made some notes here when I was thinking about that. So one of those kids are really fragile and my heart always goes out to them because they’re kids that walk around. They’re very tentative about their environments. They are always kind of waiting for the shoe to drop. They feel like everybody’s always mad at them because they’re always kind of a step behind and they’re always just– outside noise bothers them a lot. They really struggle in a classroom because they’re just slower processors. So it takes them like 5 or 10 seconds to figure out what you’re saying. And then it takes them another 5 seconds to formulate an answer and to get that out. So those kids are really tender and sweet and difficult to navigate.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:39:14.062
One of the things that you don’t want to do with them is do a very intensive phonics-based program that has a lot of contrived stories because nothing makes sense or sounds right and they struggle with that so much. And memory is really difficult for them. You can’t overload them with rules and then all the exceptions to the rules. I always use a more varied approach with them and they’ve got to get the letter boxes that we use in Listen and Write and Jack and Jill– are the number one predictor of teaching a child how to read. That phonics correlation with the 26 letters and the short vowels is just critical for teaching a child how to read. But beyond that, when I’m working with these kids that are struggling readers in my office, I just start finding some really easy kind of full languagy little stories and work on that and teach them how to read the nursery rhymes. We really use Jack and Jill as a reading device a lot of times. And then my Happy Cheetah program really takes that to a whole another level. But the nursery rhymes and the letter boxes are really important. But then you have to be really a little bit more global with them because they struggle so much.

Gretchen Roe: 00:40:34.580
And what you have just described is my middle grandson when he was four years old. And he has a sister who’s two years younger than he is. And it wasn’t until he– she started to outpace him in language that my daughter said, “Oh, I think something’s wrong here.” And I kept saying to her, “He has hearing issues. You need to get his hearing resolved.” And it wasn’t until, quite by accident, she took a piece of paper like this and started playing Simon Says. So she played two or three rounds of Simon Says with all three kids and then put the paper over her mouth. She continued to play Simon Says, and Ben couldn’t participate anymore because–

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:41:22.365
He’d think it–

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:23.000
–he couldn’t read her lips to see what she was saying.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:41:27.232
Thin adenoids and tonsils, right, drain ears, all that is really–

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:31.834
So he ended up with his first set of tubes at age four. And when he woke up from that surgery, the first thing he said to his daddy was, “I can hear you.” And they didn’t realize that part of his processing challenge was the fact that he just couldn’t hear them.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:41:52.587
That’s huge. And they’re more responsive to their own voice than somebody else’s so their speech gets all garbled. I mean, that’s a sad story, but I see that a lot in the office. A lot.

Gretchen Roe: 00:42:03.614
Well, I’ll tell you, tubes were a game changer. He’s 12 now and he has permanent tubes. The pediatrician said he will probably outgrow those tubes after puberty, but he’s going to have them until then because of the nature of– his Eustachian tubes are so tiny that they collapse. So if you’ve got a child who just can’t follow directions, doesn’t listen, they’re really not trying to annoy the absolute breath out of you.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:42:35.117
No, they’re not.

Gretchen Roe: 00:42:36.486
What’s happening? Karen, toward that end, you said something to me several years ago that has affected me so much, and that is, “Every child wants to learn. And so if your child is giving you pushback, it’s up to you to figure out why.” So I wonder if you could talk in a little bit more depth about maybe some of the things that you’ve experienced with kids in your practice over the years.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:43:05.456
I don’t know. I just think things have to be interesting for them. I think everything should be as much as possible, hands-on kinds of things, good stories. They do want to learn. God just made us so that we want to learn.

Gretchen Roe: 00:43:22.441
Oh, the other thing that you had said to me once upon a time– because I had a child who drove me insane wanting to read the same book every day for an entire year. And I think it would be great for our audience to know that child is really not intent on driving you nuts. There’s a neurological reason for that. Can you explain that?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:43:46.373
And I hear that story not infrequently. And that’s so funny because I always ask them, “What was the book?” And every single time I ask somebody about their story, the book is never the same. It’s never–

Gretchen Roe: 00:43:58.263
No.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:43:58.821
I have never, ever had two people tell me that story and have the same book. But actually, it’s the way the brain is processing. And they really do need multiple reads on familiar material to make all of that neurology work and to create those critical highways that go into frontal lobe.

Gretchen Roe: 00:44:16.856
Well, you know what? I did not realize– I just thought Duncan was trying to drive me bananas. His book was A Fly Went By. And I didn’t realize how much it had affected the whole family until my husband’s 60th birthday a couple of years ago. And there sit all six of my kids. And I’m going to poke some fun at Duncan. So I sat by the lake. And one of my children says, “And as–” and looked at the sky, and another one says, “And as I looked, a fly went.” And so here’s all six kids. They can tell [crosstalk] story.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:44:55.005
I know. It’s great.

Gretchen Roe: 00:44:56.855
So you have to be able to find the humor in it. And one of the things, I think, that you’ve taught me over and over again is to keep it light and keep the cup half full. One of the things you said at the beginning is we want to learn to teach to their strengths. So can you talk in a little bit more depth about that?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:45:16.114
Well, so that is kind of interesting. But one of the other things that has happened with research in the last 15 years or so is that in the olden days, before we understand all the neurology, the Orton-Gillingham, that was in the ’40s and the ’50s and the 1900s, we assumed that kids couldn’t learn how to read because they had some sort of a weakness. There was something missing. So teachers would spend a lot of time doing all kinds of tests trying to figure out which particular sounds maybe were troublesome or which rules were bothering the kids or that kind of thing. And what we figured out is that the brain is contextually driven and that even if you try to fill in all those holes, that really isn’t helpful because as soon as the brain finds something that is a rule breaker, then it just throws out all the previous knowledge anyway. So you kind of really– you have to work with the brain that we– a lot of times, when you have a disconnect neurologically, you just can’t fix it. It’s just not there neurologically or it’s just maybe a blind spot in the brain. I don’t know really how to even describe it, but there may be a gap there. But the best way always is what you want to do is you’re trying to always create linkage. And you have to connect– you have to connect new information to known. You just have to. So you can’t teach in a vacuum, and you can’t teach to rote memory because the active working memory doesn’t even have any storage there. It’s just rote memory. The stuff is there for an hour or two hours, and then it just disappears.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:46:53.187
Unless and until new information is connected to old, the brain doesn’t have any way to know how and where to store it. And if it doesn’t know how or where to store it, it can’t retrieve it so that you can use it for the next piece of new information that’s coming in. So you have to connect new information to old. So that’s why we always start having kids learn how to write their names because they can identify with that. And then teaching them the letters in their names are always the first letters that we want. Everything’s got to have kind of a rabbit trail, but you have to connect new information to old. That’s acting out nursery rhymes. You want to make everything as gross motor as possible and try to bring meaning to everything. And that’s why just random passages that don’t really make sense or sound right or don’t have anything that a child can connect to is really makes learning hard.

Gretchen Roe: 00:47:46.650
And I remember you saying that some of the books that are early readers, they’re kind of inane in their sentence structure because they’re looking to combine similar sounds into sentences. Kids tend to throw those out because they don’t make sense.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:48:02.636
Right. They don’t. And in our language, the higher the reading level, the less phonetically regular the language is. So by the time you even get to frog and toad, which is maybe a level 20 or entry level second grade, on any given page, you’re going to find that more than half the words are not phonetically regular. So you can actually overteach phonics. I mean, because what happens is then you’re pulling them back because again, the higher the reading level, the more diverse the language gets. And that’s why reading continues to be challenging and yet again why we want kids to read, read, read because they really need to see all of these words in context in order to keep up with the non-phonetic structures that come with higher levels.

Gretchen Roe: 00:48:48.889
Karen, do you remember you counseled with a friend of mine a year ago, and she had a child that just– they kept trying different phonics programs and different phonics programs. And you said he needed to read how many thousand words at that level to emerge to the next?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:49:06.523
Well, we have the number. I don’t like to use it very often because I don’t want people to freak out. But it’s about 20,000 words per level and they need real language. And so it can happen over a six-week period of time or it can happen over a nine-month period of time, which is frequently when it happens. But they’ve got to have that much myelin. So what happens is that you’re not born with a lot of myelin, M-Y-E-L-I-N, for those of you that want to look that up. And it’s that thin fatty sheath that coats the neurons that goes up to frontal lobe. So again, to my true doctor medical friends, this is the literacy version of myelin. But having said that, that myelin is produced when those synapse are banging against each other rapidly. So you have to have thousands and thousands of layers of myelin and you have to be fluent to create myelin, but you have to have myelin to be fluent. So it’s like a spiral.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:50:03.977
But that’s why we want to do multiple reads on familiar material, because I always have kids read stories three or four times, and you want to get it to the point that it’s so easy that their eyes are actually doing that critical saccadic sweep and going back and forth and you’re starting to get inflection before you drop a story completely. So like in Happy Cheetah, we do each story three or four days in a row because we want to make sure that we’re getting that appropriate eye movement and they’re getting the inflection and they’re getting an appropriate amount of myelin because the first couple times they read a story, they’re just decoding every single word and it’s very choppy and they’re going like this. So you have to do it until it starts feeling like you’re ice skating through it and moving. And that’s when you’re getting all that good myelin production.

Gretchen Roe: 00:50:53.774
Toward that end, then that is a benefit or a bonus to have them read the same story more than once. I know that when my kids emerged as readers until I came up upon one that struggled to emerge as a reader, as soon as they started reading, I was like, oh, read this and read this and read this. And I wanted them to read something different. And that wasn’t necessarily the best course of action.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:51:19.242
If you do a new story every day, it’s going to be choppy every single day. And then people complain that or teachers maybe complain that the kids aren’t reading fluently. Well, the problem is that if they’re giving them too much new stuff, they’re not giving them time to myelinize and get that saccadic eye movement going appropriately. So you really have to and it’s got to sound right and makes sense because it’s if it’s real contrived, then it gets choppy because they’re trying to make it make sense and it doesn’t. So fluency is really important. But a lot of times kids aren’t fluent. Again, then we’re back in the cycling again to vision stuff. So if they can’t get their eyes to move correctly and sometimes if they’re skipping lines or it’s uneven and the inflection is off, if they’re just reading flat and they’re reading through punctuation, then that’s vision. But that’s a different issue. But, see, we use a lot of that same vocabulary for similar things. But multiple reads on familiar material is just critical to good reading.

Gretchen Roe: 00:52:22.027
Which was something that I think in the 20– well, 30-plus years of me having children emerging as readers because my eldest is 18 years older than my youngest, nobody never told me that. So how important that is that we actually as parents understand that it’s okay to read the same story multiple days in a row and to your students’ benefit. Karen, I can’t believe we’re five minutes from the top of the hour. What should I have asked you that I haven’t asked?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:52:55.759
You did great. [laughter] You did great. If people have questions, I’m happy if they want to email me. I’m happy to do that and to respond. I do the best I can. We’re coming into busy season at the office, but I’m good about getting back if people have specific questions.

Gretchen Roe: 00:53:13.378
Okay. All right. I will put your contact information then in our show notes. What would be your closing thoughts for our parents today?

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:53:22.832
Keep it fun. Keep it short. Keep it varied. Get them outside to play. No screens. Do you know that screen usage after as little as six hours, we can measure the negative neurological growth on a cellular level. I mean [crosstalk].

Gretchen Roe: 00:53:41.786
Right. Because I sit here all day at my computer.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:53:44.273
Yeah, I know, but I’m talking about– you know what I’m talking about, but.

Gretchen Roe: 00:53:47.882
Sure. I’m well past the developmental stage.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:53:51.452
Yeah, but it is really neurological suicide. The brain just shuts down completely. And at some point, you never get those brain cells back. Once they’re killed, they don’t come back.

Gretchen Roe: 00:54:04.939
Right. And toward that end, if you have a child who is struggling with reading, I think Karen and I would both say to you that the best first course of action is to find a developmental optician and rule out vision as a mitigating factor. It’s not always a factor. But if it is, all the dyslexia interventions that you do–

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:54:31.683
Won’t work.

Gretchen Roe: 00:54:32.441
–will not be as successful as you want them to be because you have an organic cause to this issue.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:54:41.390
You should give phonics a shot initially, but if you’ve just had a standstill, more phonics isn’t going to fix it, right? They’ve got to go to plan B.

Gretchen Roe: 00:54:49.645
So, Karen, I have one more question. What happens when you and your spouse aren’t on the same sheet of music? That’s an interesting one.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:54:58.925
Yeah, that’s really hard. I mean, yeah, that’s really hard. You guys got to be on the same page or it’s not going to– you got to pray a lot.

Gretchen Roe: 00:55:09.274
One of the things I think is really important there is to recognize the parent who is with the child most, which usually, even in this day and age is the mom, you have an interior compass. You have a gut feeling. And those gut feelings are rarely wrong.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:55:29.736
That’s exactly right.

Gretchen Roe: 00:55:30.836
So if your gut is telling you that something’s not right in this process, then it’s important to walk forward.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:55:38.108
[crosstalk] formation. Oh, a 100%. You have to. You have to be their advocate because nobody knows them like you do and nobody loves them as much as you do. That’s why God gave us families for sure.

Gretchen Roe: 00:55:50.349
Absolutely. Absolutely. Karen, I want to thank you again for joining me today. I so appreciate your time. We’ve had so many parents ask us so many questions about this. So I think this is a really valuable message. And you said something in front of an audience in Cincinnati about eight years ago that you probably don’t even remember, but I remember it because you said enjoy your children. Relax and help them learn to read. Don’t make them learn to read.

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:56:24.760
I love that. That’s good.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:25.972
That was good stuff. I see it. I remembered that because it really was good stuff. [laughter]

Dr. Karen Holinga: 00:56:32.011
[crosstalk] believe it, still believe it. Yeah. Thanks, [crosstalk].

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:33.900
I want to thank you so much for joining me today. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. Thank all of you for joining us today. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it. And we look forward to coming into your living rooms again soon in the future. Dr. Holinga, thank you so much for joining us. Take care. Bye-bye.

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