Supporting parents

Child A has been having a little bit of a difficult time at reading, I realised this when she started boking the book and playing with the pages as she read. Her reading was quite slow and I could not understand why she was trying to move the book so much. When I talked to our librarian, she said that it could be that the girl was trying to get her eyes to focus on the texts and maybe it could be that the texts seemed to move as she read. She suggested the child to have the eye test with an optometrist to see if there are any eye tracking or other issues.

The family confirmed that her daughter would need glasses after the eye test and was really grateful that they had found this out and could help their daughter. After she got glasses, it was amazing as she never moved the books like she used. She then explained to me that she could see the words more clearly with the glasses on but without them the words looked very small.

With the glasses on, we kept working at reading with her, but I still felt that something was not quite right as the girl would struggle to read words like "on" and  "like", the words that children would have learnt to read at the magenta level. Talking to the librarian again about the problem, she had given me some strategies to use with her. The great thing was that the girl has amazing letter-sound knowledge which helps her to read words letter by letter when she is not able to recognise a word.

Strategies that the librarian suggested was
to use a card that has an indent so that the child can focus on one word at a time when reading
to work on the sight word chart and read it every day (the recognition of the words needs to be instant)
The sight words can be practiced on different ways, we have been using windows to write on with a window marker which she really enjoys.
Her eyes are working really hard to focus so if she is getting tired at reading, a teacher/parent can read the next page so she can rest her eyes and read the page after.

I also had a time to sit with her mum to talk about these strategies so that we are doing the same things at home and school. The mum really appreciated the support that we are providing and recognises how individualised the support has been. She continues to say how the experience has been very different from the previous school that they were at and talked about the importance of play in the classroom and how happy the girl is at our school.

This all has been really positive and important to reflect on. Working as an early childhood teacher for the last 10 years, I know the importance of building relationships with whaanau. All children are different and we need to understand their unique individual needs so that we can support them. Involving parents in this case has been easy and it is wonderful that we are able to provide the same support at home and school.