What is available to help students who have difficulty reading?

Retrieved October 28th from: Pixabay

Retrieved October 28th 2016 from Flickr

This week I wanted to talk about how reading, or lack thereof, seems to be affecting our youth. My placement this year is in a fifth grade classroom, and one thing I have been amazed by, is the number of students with reading disabilities. There are two in my class and this seemed shocking to me, in the fifth grade students are struggling with reading and no alarm bells seem to have gone off yet for anyone regarding this. "What are we doing to help these students?" was the first thing that came to my mind.

I have in fact seen some very interesting resources that are available for these students to use. Every day, students in my class are assigned twenty minutes of "reading for pleasure" after their last nutrition break, during this time, the two students in the class are allowed to use the computer and sign on to a website called TumbleBooks. It is a great resource, provided through the Welland Public Library, and essentially they can pick any book they would like that is available in the E-Book version, there are many categories to choose from, and the book will be read to them as they can listen to it, while the words being read are highlighted on the screen, creating a relationship between what they are hearing and seeing. 

Retrieved October 28th from: Welland Public Library

One thing I love about this resource is the many different options available, students are able to choose the appropriate level of reading, and the style of reading, they can select picture books, Natural Geographic magazines, newspaper clips or comic strips. I feel like it gives them confidence having this at their disposal as they are still able to "read" for pleasure along with the rest of the class instead of being demotivated and getting frustrated by having difficulties reading the "traditional" way. I do believe that these types of resources would help all students, not only students with reading disabilities, become fluent in their reading as hearing someone else read something makes us more aware of what to do with each different type of punctuation mark and sentence structure.

I once read somewhere that "a fluent reader generally translates into a well-written person". This is something I strongly believe in because I have seen it first-hand. My brother has always been extremely interested in reading all different types of books, fiction, mystery, crime and even biographies and history books. I've seen the way he writes and he does not hesitate, he seems to have less issues getting his ideas onto paper and lets his creativity flow.

If students are able to truly become interested in what they are reading, I feel that it would encourage them to become more engaged, if they are provided with many options and feel less "forced" to read, it will allow them to choose more liberally. Just because students have difficulty reading does not mean they are any less interested in it, we mustn't give up on those children as there is nothing worse than discouraging and demotivating a child, we must find ways to encourage them and help guide them in the right direction with all the wonderful tools we have available to us as educators! 

Retrieved October 28th 2016 from: Flickr