Reading Is Easy

While teaching the children whose reading test scores were not up to grade level, I developed and used several techniques which proved very successful in helping all of my students to learn to read. Thus they were able to read to learn. These few methods are in my book and are my purpose for writing the book. These methods worked for hundreds of primary students over the years. One chapter in Reading Is Easy or Ought to Be is titled Remedial Reading and exposes most of my best methods. As an addendum I added a short chapter to show a great way to study for spelling and other hints for successful learning. An example being Spelling game. Add a Letter, or Take Away a Letter, can be played with spelling words or words pulled from the reading material. This builds vocabulary, increases listening span, and comprehension. Spelling words or story titles and names can be used to select words. The object is to make it easy for the inexperienced reader to quickly add a letter to change a word, or to take a letter from the word to change it into a new word. It is very helpful to see small changes in the many words in our language that are alike with only slight changes. This activity can be played with flashcards having students write the words as a list, or as blackboard game similar to the vowel ladder, scoring points for correct answers. Attention span and speed of reading is improved by playing this type of word game.

Spelling Study

Spelling lists and spelling books start early and follow us right through elementary school. For some, spelling is fun and for others it is a chore or impossible. As soon words get longer than two or three letters in length, the process used to help us learn our weekly spelling list gets longer too. There is a similar pattern to learning the words from a spelling textbook. When we first see the list of words they are on the board, or in a chapter of a spelling book. Whoever looked ahead to see what comes next in this book? There will always be sentences for us to fill in the correct spelling word and an activity to present the meaning of the words. Then we will get word definitions that must fit a matching spelling word. These exercises may make it easier to learn lists of words, but are they ever learned without requiring rote memory in the process?

I have a system that can add some interest in learning spelling words and maybe make it a bit easier to remember them, especially for test day. First, it is necessary to list the words alphabetically, but not by the first letter unless it is a vowel. Alphabetize all the words by the first vowel in the word. Line them up with single vowels first and double vowels second. Now take off any prefixes such as, de, con, re, in, un, dis. It might be helpful to alphabetize these unless they are in order already. There may be endings called suffixes, to remove such as ing, ous, ion, ent, etc. Now you have spelling words. Now you arrange the part that remains in alphabetic order, too. These words are root words. Many of these words you already know. You can even add different beginnings and endings on the words in your new root word list, because you now see how easy it is. Put the prefix and suffix back on the root words and good luck with your spelling test.

Some words are going to have to be memorized, but you’ll find they are not a large group compared to all the words you already know how to spell. These words are members of the few “jokers” that appear in my window card activity, the mainstay of my successful remedial reading methods.