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Help the child become a self-teacher of new words. Reading Machine doesn't just tell the child how to say a word. That might help to reduce frustration, but it wouldn't teach the child how to figure out words independently. Research on reading and the brain is now very clear: The brain learns word best and fastest when you pay attention to how each letter in the word goes with each sound in the word. Great readers can teach themselves any word because they've built up skill in knowing how letters typically go with sounds in words. Poor readers don't approach words this way. They guess at words, often using just the first or last letter and information from pictures. Often they do this because early on in their reading instruction—it worked! It was easy, and they were smart, and they were usually successful without having to master decoding skill. But those habits only work at the start. Eventually they break down. Kids don't learn how to decode new words, so they are helpless in learning new ones when there aren't enough clues from pictures or context. Reading Machine gets kids on the right track, right from the start. It models for them how to look at words and learn them. It gives the brain exactly the kind of attention to each word that's needed—information and attention on how each letter goes with each sound. The brain is a super pattern-recognizer. It can take this information and quickly build up the skill to recognize these sound-letter patterns in other words too. With the Reading Machine, your child can learn the specific words in the book sets faster, and can also learn to become independent in figuring out new words. |
