Transcript
Help Kids Learn to Keep Their Eyes on the Text
Linda Farrell: In working with Autumn, even though she’s not a reader, she’s already developing a habit that we see in many older readers that we work with. And that is … she looks up and around and every place except at what she’s doing at the task. And the task when we have felts — if we’re going /m/, /eik/, make — is to look at the felts. It focuses her attention on the task at hand, which is very important. It should be a part of a routine. When you look down at whatever manipulative you’re using for pre-readers, whether it’s felts or cubes or whether you’re looking at letters and singing the alphabet song, you need to be looking at the manipulative, because later when a student reads, it is critical, necessary. I cannot tell you how important it is that we look at the words when we read them. We can’t read them without looking at them. And if the children don’t have the habit of looking at the word, they will be struggling readers. That’s just a given, because you can’t read, the best reader in the world can’t read if they don’t look at the words. And it’s one of the habits that we see so often. Now Autumn, let’s just start her right now and have her part of her routines be when you have manipulatives, which will eventually turn into letters, you’re going to look at what you’re doing. That’s just part of what we want her to have as just her automatic behavior.
This interview with reading expert Linda Farrell is part of the Reading Rockets special series, Looking at Reading Interventions.