[00:00:00] Dr. Karen Holinga: When I do a reading assessment, I always start with something easy that I know that the child is either familiar with or something that he’s going to be very, very comfortable with. Then what I do is I start decreasing the font size. Usually, by the time we get to easy chapter books like Magic Tree House, they start to have to use a finger. I start seeing head movement like this, or they start not self-correcting. Maybe they’re just guessing at words.

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[00:00:32] Gretchen: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this very special episode of The Demme Learning Show. I have recruited Dr. Karen Holinga to spend an hour with me talking about reading. This is the first of four conversations that we will record in the next two weeks, talking in depth about what happens when children struggle when they learn to read. We are now in a juxtaposition of society that it’s make or break.

We have to be able to help our kids emerge as readers. More and more children report not liking to read because they’re busily on devices. We’ve got to change that score because a literate society turns on our ability to read. Dr. Holinga has spent many years in this field. You’ll learn her personal story. We’re going to talk in depth today about some things you, as parents, can be doing, about some assumptions we shouldn’t make about diagnoses and things that we see in our children.

Then we’re going to carry this conversation into next Tuesday, talking with our senior placement specialist, Lisa Chimento, talking about what she sees when she has conversations with families of children who struggle. We’ll continue that with a conversation with our own Amanda Capps, talking about the personal cost of kids struggling in a family when they learn to read. Then we’ll conclude in September with a conversation with Dr. Rosalie Hopkins, who is a vision specialist who’s going to talk with us about how you can change the game for your kids. I’m so excited to have Dr. Holinga here today. I’m going to ask Dr. Karen to introduce herself, and then we’ll get into the meat of this conversation.

[00:02:27] Dr. Holinga: Good afternoon. I’m Dr. Karen Holinga. I’m the creator of Spelling You See and a Happy Cheetah Reading program. My journey was, as I’ve always went to public schools my whole life, had a really good run there. Then got a degree, a bachelor’s in elementary education with a certification in preschool education. Then got a teaching job and loved teaching. I was teaching for six years. Then I got a master’s in reading because that was always closest and nearest and dearest to my heart from Ohio State University. I got my undergrad at Indiana.

Then we decided to homeschool. I guess I should tell you that. Initially, we started homeschooling because we wanted to give the kids a really good start spiritually, and I wanted to do that. It was fun. We had three children in four years, so it was a busy time. My husband traveled a lot, and we were away from home. Our families were from Chicago, and we were in Columbus, Ohio. It was a one-man band for a while. I started homeschooling, and my first daughter learned easily and well. I joke now when I do conferences and say she was one of those kids that probably would have learned how to read with a bag on her head and a dark closet. She just did it.

Still, I was so full of myself, and it was so exciting to teach my own kid how to read, even though I had taught lots of other kids to read. Then I had daughter number 2, and she really struggled. We just didn’t know what to do. Kindergarten was hard, and then first grade and second and third grade was really hard. Then we started homeschooling because I had been the go-to person in the district. Here I was with a child that was really struggling.

My husband would say to me– She would go out on Saturdays and help him work on the car because he’s a car guy. He would come in to wash his hands or something, and he would say, “Care, she’s got a mind like a steel trap. How come this is the one thing?” He was very kind, and he’d say that we can’t teach her. I would go, “I don’t know.” I literally cried myself to sleep for three years. It was so painful because I couldn’t figure it out, and she was so bright.

I knew curriculums at that point. I was really working through a lot of the homeschool things that were available and public school curriculum too, because I was familiar with that. Anyway, we eventually figured it out. One of the things that I wanted to talk about was that we homeschooled for 12 years, and then we sent our kids to high school, which is not something I would recommend now. At the time, they were all in the hard sciences, and the math was above my pay grade. They needed really much higher-level science and math, than I was prepared to teach.

I had always wanted to go back to school to figure out how those children that were struggling– maybe there was new research. I went back to Ohio State, and I was there full-time in a reading program. My degree is in developmental reading, curriculum development, and professional development. I’m a teacher trainer. There was amazing research that had come out during that 12 or 15 years that I had been gone. The materials that I developed were really an outgrowth of all of that.

When I finally graduated and opened my reading clinic and was doing assessments for homeschoolers in the state of Ohio, I was seeing a real pattern of children coming in that were very, very bright, parents that were giving everything they had, new curriculums, and had used every program under the sun. Many of the children had been in vision therapy. The parents had spent thousands of dollars. A lot of them were in therapy for over two years. There were all kinds of issues. They were still struggling, even after having spent all that money.

I was on a hunt at that point, trying to figure out what were the outliers that I didn’t know about. I could do dyslexia. I could do neuro delays. I could do developmental delays. I could do all of that. It ended up that there was a consistent pattern with a lot of these kids that they were misdiagnosed with reading and auditory processing issues, and the parents really didn’t know where to go or what to do. I started connecting dots. It took me a couple of years, but we finally figured out what the missing pieces were and then how to go and get help.

[00:07:02] Gretchen: You spent a lot of time just one-on-one looking at what was working and what wasn’t working. You’re the one who taught me that sometimes kids can negotiate when they’re in a Hop on Pop and they’re in a lower-level reading book where the font is 16 or 18. The wheels blow off the wagon when the font becomes smaller. Can you talk about– I still profoundly remember this lesson that you taught me. It’s been probably 10 or 12 years since you taught me this lesson.

[00:07:37] Dr. Holinga: What’s that about? The font size?

[00:07:39] Gretchen: And where parents will see– Sometimes we are deluded into believing, “Oh, we’re off to the races here,” and then it falls apart.

[00:07:50] Dr. Holinga: When I do a reading assessment, I always start with something easy that I know that the child is either familiar with or something that he’s going to be very, very comfortable with. Then what I do is I start decreasing the font size. Usually, by the time we get to easy chapter books like Magic Tree House, they start to have to use a finger. I start seeing head movement like this, or they start not self-correcting. Maybe they’re just guessing at words.

This is probably an interesting maybe rabbit trail. I have never, in all the years—I’ve been doing this for over 30 years now—I have never, ever, one time, [chuckles] and I can’t say this about anything else that I can think of, had a child come in that hasn’t had enough phonics training. Everybody in the universe knows that to learn how to read, you have to have sound-to-letter correspondence, and that a child has to be able to make that sound-to-letter match in order to learn how to read.

The problem is that we have so many silent letters and so many rule breakers. I’m going to give you an example. The word head is spelled H-E-A-D, and you’ve got two vowels, and the first E is short. It’s not long. We have so many rule breakers that it creates terrible confusion for kids. At some point by the end of first grade, and absolutely by mid-second grade, they’ve got to be switching over to context in order to be reading consistently, fluently, well.

More on any given day, probably as many as half of your words are not going to be phonetically consistent. They do learn what we teach, so you’ve got to get that shift. What happens is that if they’re reading at all, I know that the sound-to-letter correspondence is okay, that phonics, if you will, is not the problem. Then we’ve got to figure out, “Okay, where is the glitch?” A lot of times, I would say that 80% maybe of the kids that are referred to me—I get tons of referrals—as being dyslexic, are actually not dyslexic. The medical definition of dyslexia is the inability to make sound-letter correspondence or to clap syllables, that kind of thing, or with speech issues.

Most of them have something going on that’s vision-oriented. When we get into easy chapter books, like if we move from Frog and Toad, which is a big 14 or 16 font, into easy chapter books like Magic Tree House, all of a sudden there’s too much print on the page, they’re dropping out small words. They’re losing their place. That means that the two eyes are not aligned together, and they’re either getting double vision or the print is dancing. Something’s going on that is creating real neurological angst.

Then they get a cortisol release, and then the amygdala shuts down, and they go into fight or flight, and then they’re a basket case. Just watching the body language is really helpful and important.

[00:10:52] Gretchen: Karen, one of the things I remember vividly you saying in the first year that I knew you is that the vitality and the necessity of being read to before you can learn to read. Can you talk in a little bit more depth about why that is important? I feel like we’re losing that capacity to read to our children on a regular basis.

[00:11:16] Dr. Holinga: I think we really are. I know generations previous to us taught their kids all the nursery rhymes, and they clapped them, and they danced to them. I have so many millennial moms, and they weren’t even taught the nursery rhymes. They don’t even know Jack and Jill went up the hill and those kinds of things. We did in Spelling You See that was in our Jack and Jill book that’s all based on nursery rhymes, Little Miss Muffet Sat on a Tuffet, because that’s so helpful for understanding that there’s a story there, and the rhythm is helpful, and they can hear the sounds and the rhyming.

We tell moms that’s going to be a pretend read, teaching the nursery rhyme on the way to the grocery store, and then use the index finger of their dominant hand and have them follow the words. By the third or fourth day, a lot of these kids are starting to pick up reading already. There’s nothing that replaces sitting on the couch, snuggling, listening to a good story. I love Dr. Seuss books and beautiful story books that have gorgeous illustrations, and just getting the kids acclimated to what books are like and that they tell a story.

This is the other thing: our brains are created for meaning and to learn how to read, but what happens is that we have to put the software in, if you will. That’s what I call it. In English, we go left to right, top down. Hebrew goes the opposite way. It goes opposite, right to left. Chinese goes up and down. It’s our job as parents for these little guys, well, for all kids really, but four or five, six or seven, to, actually, you get your finger in there occasionally and show them how English works and that this is a word, this is a word, and this is a word.

It’s so foundational, and there’s so many kids that just don’t have that opportunity. What we know research-wise is that a child needs to be read to—this is going to freak everybody out—a minimum of 10,000 words before they’re able to learn how to read. It’s really, really important.

[00:13:35] Gretchen: Karen, another thing that I remember you teaching me is that sometimes, when a child emerges as a reader, we get really excited. We’re like, “Oh, read this book, and read this book, and read this book.” Can you talk about why it’s necessity to have more than one read on the same materials?

[00:13:56] Dr. Holinga: One of the things I want to talk about is that the higher the reading level—it’s very important for parents to think about this—the less phonetically regular the language is. We know, I’m coming back to this again, that in English, context is the carrier. It’s very, very important for children to know you get in the car, are you going to Toledo, or are you going south to Florida? It’s very important for you to give yourself permission to not feel guilty about reading all these stories to your kids first.

Unless I’m in an evaluation-type situation, I never give a child a book to read that he hasn’t heard first or that I haven’t read to him previously because they need to be familiar with the vocabulary and what the book is about. Then, after they read it, then they need to read those books multiple times because, since the language is difficult and not consistent, they have to hear and see those words multiple times in order for the brain to get to a place where it can store it properly in long-term memory. Unless it’s stored properly, the brain isn’t going to be able to retrieve it. That’s how you achieve fluency as well. Multiple reads on familiar material.

[00:15:15] Gretchen: I remember vividly one of my kids, my first dyslexic child, had a book that he insisted that we read every single day. It wasn’t until you came along and he was a teenager that you taught me that he really wasn’t trying to drive me insane. [laughs] You had said to me his brain was seeking order and you should have just read it to him. We did. We read it to him every day.

Unfortunately, my husband traveled like yours did, like George did. We had Pat read it into a cassette recorder because not only did he want Pat to read it, the rest of us couldn’t read it in the same manner that he loved. He wanted his dad to read it to him. [laughs]

[00:16:09] Dr. Holinga: The other thing, and I was thinking about this a little bit this morning when I was thinking about what we were going to talk about, theoretically, you can teach a child how to read almost with any book. Probably the best advice is to find something that they really love. If it’s about the outdoors or about hiking or I can’t tell you how many little boys I’ve taught how to read talking about World War II airplanes.

Making the font large enough so that it’s comfortable, and then having good picture support, and reading them those pages first and then letting them read them back to me. That’s really how the brain neurologically processes language. If you’ve got a kid that likes plants or birds, run with that. You don’t have to use a particular book to get the job done.

[00:17:00] Gretchen: Right. However, you have found, over the years, that often there are elements lacking in reading programs. Now tell us a little bit about the evolution of Happy Cheetah because I have seen families who have had no success with multiple reading programs—one, two, three other programs—and then they found their way to Happy Cheetah and they’ve been successful.

[00:17:29] Dr. Holinga: This is the third workbook in Happy Cheetah. What we’ve done is we’ve got a 10-minute format, and every two pages is 10 minutes. What we do is, after we introduce the story in a guided reader—which means that I’ve read the story to the child first, it’s had really good picture support, here’s a funny story about alligator sunbathing, and see big print and extra space between the lines in the print—I read it to them, they read it to me two or three times, and then we come here and they read it without the picture support.

Then we have some Q&A questions about what sounds right, what makes sense. Everything that they read sounds right and makes sense. We always incorporate about 5 minutes of copywork, and these sentences are taken directly from the material. That’s a day’s worth of work, and it’s everything except math. It’s keeping it short and to the point, and we’re setting them up for success. The research shows us that if we incorporate as little as 10 minutes a day—and in this case, it can be done in 5 minutes—of copywork that is directly connected to the story and the new vocabulary that we’re introducing, you can double the reading levels in half the time.

I know that there are programs out there that use copywork, Charlotte Mason, like maybe they’ll copy Bible verses or something like that, but it’s not connected to the material that we’re actually using to teach the child how to read. That’s the difference here. What we do here is we have letter boxes, and we make sure that the sound-to-letter correspondence is good and the words are over here on this page. There’s not even a teacher manual with this program. It is totally open and go.

The thing is that we really work on those short vowels and the sound-to-letter correspondence. Once you crack the code for these kids and then give them something that’s not too hard to read and then do multiple reads three or four days in a row on that material, we build for fluency, and their brain really understands how English works, and they run with it.

[00:19:45] Gretchen: I think one of the things there that is so valuable, I want to repeat it because you said doing multiple reads three or four days in a row, because we fail as adults to recognize, we think variety is a spice of life, but we fail to recognize how important it is for children to have practice and fluency with the same words.

[00:20:10] Dr. Holinga: It only takes about two minutes. We always go a couple stories back to do a warm-up and then one story forward, and maybe two new stories a week, but they’re short stories. It’s that repetition. It makes it feel easy. It makes the brain relax. They start recognizing all those sight words because they’re embedded properly in a meaningful way, and it starts to really create a rhythm for them.

They know that when they come to the table, they’re going to be okay, they’re going to be able to do it because Mom’s going to help, and it’s a story that they did yesterday, and they don’t choke. That’s the whole thing because they really do panic.

[00:20:45] Gretchen: Can you also talk a little bit about– you mentioned here that you’re time-limiting the amount of investment of time for the student. Can you talk about why that’s important?

[00:20:56] Dr. Holinga: That was a huge research finding. There were a couple, I guess, maybe like 15 years ago, is you have to connect new information to old. That’s really, really important. You can never teach in a vacuum. That’s why it’s really good to have these stories familiar, and then we’re building on familiar vocabulary. Every story maybe only has 5 or 10 new words, but over a period of time, that’s amazing that you really take those reading levels up.

The other thing is that the copywork is very important, doubling reading levels in half the time when you’re doing 5 or 10 minutes of copywork daily with familiar material. The fluency builds myelinization, that thin fatty sheath that coats the neurons that goes up to frontal lobes so that the brain can easily and quickly assimilate the new information. Oh, I know what you wanted me to say. This is the thing. We know that, in the active working memory, which is the hippocampus, the processing center of the brain can only process so much information at a time.

We know that the hippocampus, the active working memory, has a load limit. We also know—take a deep breath—that it’s your child’s age plus two minutes. If you’ve got a 10-year-old, you’ve got about 12 minutes that you have. You can get in, and you’ve got to get out, and then you have to allow for processing time. It really is consistent. The example that I like to use in the office is pretend you have an eight-ounce glass of water, and you’ve got a big pitcher, and you can pour a whole gallon of water into that eight-ounce glass, but it’s only going to hold that eight ounces. If you do more than that, you’re going to have a mess.

You really do have to, like you’re saying, you’ve got to get in, but then you’ve got to get out. Then, when you do that quick review the next day, because everything on that page that I just showed you just takes two minutes. You look at the guided reader for two minutes. You look at the story in there without the picture support and the workbook for two minutes. We pull some words, and we play with those for two minutes. We do the copy work for five minutes. It’s like clip, clip, clip. You are in. You are out. Go outside and play. We know that the brain has got to have that time to assimilate. We’ve got to connect that new information to old, and we’ve got to give the brain time to do that.

[00:23:25] Gretchen: Karen, can you talk about, because I know you’ve said the word that puts a panic in half the boy moms’ minds—copywork—because boys don’t want to hold these things. They just hate them with a passion. How do we get past that? This is when you move from parent to marketer [chuckles] to teach the kids how important it is for them to be willing to engage in this process.

[00:23:55] Dr. Holinga: I think a couple of things. First of all, the way the Happy Cheetah is set up is we use a two-line format. It’s similar to the Handwriting Without Tears. We need a clean page because a lot of times when they look at a page, it’s so busy, or there’s so many dotted lines on it that, visually, it’s overwhelming, and they get a tummy ache right away as soon as they see it. That dotted line in the middle often creates visual confusion, so you need a clean page.

The other thing is that, for lowercase letters, you want to do everything single-stroke, top-down. In the prep book, we have a page in here where it gives you that sequence. Here it is. Take a look at it. We have all the C letters are C, and then we do an A with a round up-down, and a D is a round up-down, and a G is a round up-down. Every time they pick up their pencil, they have to make a visual decision about where to go down, and that makes open season for backwards letters. That creates terrible frustration and confusion.

They’re very resistant to doing that. When I taught kindergarten, we would spend the whole year just getting kids to transition from capital letters to lowercase letters because if you don’t do that, the first-grade teacher is never going to be able to teach them how to read because everything’s in lower print. We always teach the capital letters first because those big block letters are much easier to visually and physically navigate.

That’s a good thing, but you’ve got to get them switched over. They’ve got to get quick on those letters. I have a stand-up easel that’s a magnetic dry-erase board, and we just work on– we’ll do three C’s, and then we’ll do three A’s, which is a C and an up-down, and then we’ll do three D’s, which is a round up-down. You’ve got to get those letters really automatic. Then you’ve got to give them copywork that is something that’s familiar. Those sentences are all taken from a story that they already know. “I am Jill” maybe is the last little sentence in the first story.

The other thing is kids can’t copy from top down and they can’t copy from page to page because visually they don’t have good orientation initially. The way we have it set up is the way we did it in Spelling You See, with reason. You see that this line here, this bee is buzzing around; that line is directly under there, so that all they have to do is bring it down. It makes it so easy. They can get that whole sentence copied in 90 seconds or two minutes because it’s right there, and they don’t have to make any decisions. All they have to do is look at that bee, and they know which direction it is, and they know that that’s the word buzzing, and they can go.

What you want to do is you always want to teach to a strength and not a weakness. You want to make it doable. You want to set them up for success. This program does that. We just start real easy with a line or two, and we just make it for two minutes, and then we let them go. It’s real important for them to leave the table with a smile on their face, but you’ve got to make it so that they can achieve that success.

Sometimes I’ll throw a penny at them or throw pennies. I’ll say, “You did 20 letters on this page,” and I’ll give them 20 pennies, and then they think they’re rich and they go away with [chuckles] the coins. That was a really good question, but you have to go, “How do you eat an elephant?” One bite at a time, just little bits. They get good at that really fast, and it is amazing because it is a game changer. Everything happens at the gross motor level first. For the programs that don’t have that copywork, you just feel like you’re grinding your teeth every minute you’re sitting at a table with a kid.

[00:27:49] Gretchen: Karen, in these last couple minutes, what would be your closing words to parents who are sitting with their children and they’re concerned because reading is not unfolding like they envisioned it to be?

[00:28:02] Dr. Holinga: Make a phone call. Call somebody. There is a website. What is it?

[00:28:09] Gretchen: COVD.org. Yes. On that website, you can find the– it’s called a Quality of Life Survey.

[00:28:20] Dr. Holinga: That survey, and then the other thing is that maybe before you find an eye doctor, get in touch with Demme or Gretchen or I, and we’ll give you some referral names as well because these people are hard to find, and that treatment can be really expensive, and it can not work. That was one of the things that happened to me was I was getting all these referrals, and people had been in all these therapies and spent thousands and thousands of dollars, and it hadn’t worked.

We are very vested in making sure that you get to where you need to be. I always hold my cross here, and I say, “I promise you I’m not getting anything from the referral.” I promise. We just really want to help you because we’re homeschool moms, and we love you, and we know that this is a hard journey.

[00:29:05] Gretchen: It is indeed. Dr. Karen, I want to thank you for this time. [crosstalk] You’re a busy, busy woman, and I’m so delighted that you spent this hour with me.

[00:29:15] Dr. Holinga: Thanks for having me.

[00:29:15] Gretchen: Again, for our audience, let me remind you that this is the first in a series of four conversations. Next week, Lisa Chimentowill be joining me talking about the things that she looks for in the diagnostic process with a child who’s struggling. I think you’ll find that a very insightful conversation. That will be followed by my coworker and dear friend, Amanda Capps, talking about the personal cost of being a parent who has had children who struggle.

Then we’re going to conclude this series with Dr. Rosalie Hopkins, who is a FCOVD. She’s a Fellow of the College of Optometric Vision Developmentalists. She will talk about the cost you pay when you don’t follow through with the therapies necessary to help a child develop the skill to read successfully.

[00:30:09] Dr. Holinga: Gretchen, let me say one more thing. Don’t go to ophthalmologists. Those are MDs; they’re surgeons, and the first thing they do is dilate to see if your child is a candidate for surgery. That’s not what we’re talking about here. They even give glasses, but they’re not refractive specialists. You need an optometrist who has this additional three-year fellowship in order to guide your way.

[00:30:35] Gretchen: Absolutely. Thank you so much for that clarification. That’s really important. Thank you all today for trusting us to come into your living rooms. This is a wildly important conversation. This is the song of my heart because I see so many kids. My kids were book devourers. Each one of them had their cute little German basket. We went to the library every Monday morning, and they filled their basket with books. To this day, my kids are ardent readers. You don’t get there as an adult if you don’t start as a child, so make sure you’re filling your children’s cup with good words. Thank you all so much for that.