My last post explained how Creative Art Therapy can help students learn to read. My reading programs, Camp Sharigan and the Reading Orienteering Club, are not craft programs.  They are teaching programs:  teaching programs that combine learning and counseling.  Our purpose is not to prove that we can make paper alligators, pop-bottle rockets, or even cloth squids.  The hands-on Creative Art Therapy projects help create an intrinsic motivational environment for learning  that the program uses to encourage children to stay focused on the task and to complete their work (Chandler & Tricot, 2015; Moreau, 2015).  The hands-on crafts become our teaching tools (Hillman et al., 2014). 
 
Hands-on projects can teach a child how to organize, follow directions, and improve their completion skills on a task.  Children quickly learn that, if they do not complete a project, the project does not go home.  As I like to tell the children, you cannot drive a half-finished car down the road.  We have a make-up day at the end of each session. This gives children a chance to go back and complete their work, but we do not JUST finish the craft project.  Finishing a project means that a child goes back to the original session and completes the vowel clustering tasks from that session.  Our intent is not just to make a craft project, paint a costume, or even to make a pop-up book.  The purpose of both Camp Sharigan and the Reading Orienteering Club is to teach children how to read.  Vowel clustering is the key [see my blog post from 1-27-18].  Vowel clustering is where we teach children to take a word apart letter sound by letter sound and then put those sounds back together and pronounce or read the word.  We also teach children to build new words from a common letter sound.  Vowel clustering fits perfectly with Creative Art Therapy.

For more information about these programs in action, click the Reading News link above. 

Children present a puppet play that they wrote themselves. Each puppet is covered in words that they have captured (that is, tricky words that they learned). Watching the puppet play, family members can see how the children have improved their reading and writing skills. 

Here, a child proudly shows off a puppet made during the Reading Orienteering Club. The puppet is covered with new words that the student captured. Children will work on a project like this much more eagerly than they will work on a boring worksheet.

Children look for excuses not to finish a worksheet. But they look for excuses to finish a Creative Art Therapy project. 

People often ask me, why do your reading programs use so many craft projects? Doesn’t that waste time you should spend teaching reading?  No, it does not waste time: Creative Art Therapy uses hands-on paper projects, painting, and puppet plays to teach children how to read.  Creative Art Therapy enables my group-centered prevention programs, such as Camp Sharigan and the Reading Orienteering Club, to combine learning and counseling. Combining learning and counseling helps students who have struggled in the classroom or possibly even failed in their attempts to learn to read to become successful readers.  We have even had children move up four grade levels in reading in one year through our program.  So yes, we are teaching children how to read.

Let’s look at an example from my Reading Orienteering Club program in Corpus Christi this fall.  The children arrive at 4:00 PM. They have been in school all day, but they arrive eager to see what awaits them because as soon as they walk in the door, they find a brand-new hands-on paper project waiting for them.  I start with very simple projects at first: a paper alphabet snake, a paper panda puppet, and a tissue paper ant named Alfred (“Alfred Ant” for the letter A!).  Each of these hands-on paper projects become puppets in the weekly puppet show.  Each of these puppets is covered in captured words. A captured word is a word the child does not know, cannot read, or cannot spell.  We capture the word and use 4 steps [see my blog post from 2-14-18 on the 4 steps] in learning the word so that we add this new word to our reading and comprehension vocabulary.  Using a simple paper puppet, the children start the late afternoon program excited.  Then, they are excited to go from workstation to workstation to find new words to capture so they can finish their puppet and take it home.  Each puppet is assigned a certain number of new words that it must capture before it can join the puppet show and go home.  In this way, five minutes tracing a puppet pattern becomes not a waste of time, instead, a paper hands-on puppet becomes an intrinsic motivator and a teaching technique for helping children to learn new words [for more see my blog post from 3-17-18].

You may be asking, could you not accomplish the same thing with a worksheet or a simple cut-and-paste activity?  No, Creative Art Therapy involves making a project, a puppet the child can then go on and use in a puppet play or take-home to practice with.  Worksheets simply do not have the same impact as a creative art project.  Be careful, because Creative Art Therapy is much more than just simply making a craft project.  Children love to make craft projects, but Creative Art Therapy projects are teaching tools. 
 
Creative Art Therapy hands-on projects encourage children to go out and learn new words, work on vowel sounds that may be difficult for them, and read challenging stories and puppet plays.  We have a rule at my reading programs that projects do not go home until they are finished.  A finished project must include the 20 or 30 capture words included in that session.  It’s about finishing what is being taught for that session.  In this way, Creative Art Therapy projects become a basic part of teaching.  Our goal is to teach children to read at their age level. 
 
Creative Art Therapy projects also teach completion skills—finishing what you start. We use Creative Art Therapy projects to accomplish that goal.  Why?
 
First, research tells us that combining learning and counseling together in one program is a much more effective way to teach students to read (Kvarme et al., 2010).  When you combine teaching and counseling together in the same program, you have a much stronger teaching approach (Baskin et al., 2010; Brigman & Webb, 2007; Huang et. al, 2005). Creative Art Therapy projects also have a healing factor.  They help students overcome the sense of failure that comes from not being able to read like other students in the classroom (Jensen et al., 2007; Trout, Lienemann, Reid, & Epstein, 2007).
 
Creative Art Therapy projects work hand-in-hand with intrinsic motivation, offer something new and challenging, and help students rebuild self-efficacy or the belief that they can learn to read (Bandura, 1977).   The more involved students become in the process of learning to read, the more students will improve in reading (Froiland and Worrell, 2016; Reeve & Lee, 2014).  
 
My next post, coming later today, shows how Creative Art Therapy motivates children to read while combining learning with counseling.

The latest findings by the Nation’s Report Card show that 63% of children across the nation cannot read proficiently at grade level by fourth grade.  That is more than half the students across the nation.  At eighth grade, 64% cannot read proficiently at grade level and even by 12th grade 63% cannot read proficiently at grade level when they graduate from high school (Nation’s Report Card 2017 scores).
 
Why can’t we teach these students to read?  Well, we can.  The problem is that we are using teaching methods in the classroom that have been proven not to work effectively for all students.  Research shows that the method you use to teach a student to read can determine whether the student succeeds and learns to read or fails and does not learn to read.  (Chronis-Tuscano et al., 2015).
 
Research proves that whole language, phonics—even systematic phonics, and balanced literacy are failed teaching methods.  Yes, I know, some children do learn to read using phonics and some even learn to read under whole language, but, if over half of the students across the nation are not learning to read proficiently at their grade level, then something is wrong.  We need a new teaching method.  As neuroimaging research has proven:  

Whole language doesn’t work. 

• Louisa Moates says that the problem with whole language is that it doesn’t work.
•  Yoncheva, Wise, & McCandliss (2015) show that whole language does not teach children to sound out words—decoding and encoding are essential for effective reading. 

Phonics does not work for many students, especially struggling students.

• Jeanne Sternlicht Chall (1967) stated that phonics leaves many students failing.
•  Sebastian P. Suggate’s 2016 study showed that phonics was not as effective as phonemic awareness teaching techniques.
•  National Reading Panel (2000) stated that even systematic phonics wasn’t effective with “low-achieving readers in 2nd through 6th grade.

 
Balanced literacy doesn’t work, either.

• Louisa Moates says that balanced literacy is simply a failed idea.
• Merely combining whole language and phonics together as balanced literacy does not correct the problems of either teaching method.  As Dr. Sally Shaywitz (see Overcoming Dyslexia, 2003) explains, “Children do not learn to read by memorizing a word list.  Most children, especially those who struggle in reading, do not learn to read by memorizing phonics rules” (p. 78). 

   
Why do these teaching methods not work? 
 
1. “Until recently, almost everyone thought that we store words by having some type of visual image of every word we know….  Many teaching approaches presume this…. [both whole language and phonics make this assumption]. We assume that if students see the words enough, they will learn them. This is not true…. I believe this assumption that we store words based on visual memory is a major reason why we have widespread reading difficulties in our country." (David Kilpatrick in Equipped for Reading Success, pp. 29-39).
 
2. “In order to read, a child must ‘enter the language system;’ this means that the child must activate and use the brain circuits that are already in place for oral language…. “ (Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia, 2003, pp. 59-68).
 
3. “The letters of our printed language are supposed to represent the sounds of our spoken language…. We use our oral-linguistic filing system as the basis for word recognition…. orthographic mapping will only occur if the student has adequate phonemic awareness/analysis. If he cannot pull apart the sounds in words, he cannot align those sounds to the order of the letters…. Mapping must not be confused with phonics. Mapping and phonics differ in some very important ways….”(David Kilpatrick in Equipped for Reading Success, pp. 29-39).

What teaching methods do work?
 
We do have teachings methods that have been researched, tested, and proven to work for all students.  Researchers are beginning to develop teaching methods based on the oral language system.  One such approach being used with dyslexic students is the Davis Program. 
 
I use vowel clustering in all of my reading programs.  Vowel clustering has been proven to work with all ages, with students who have failed for multiple years, and even for students from low socio-economic neighborhoods.  (Clanton Harpine & Reid, 2009). Vowel clustering (See my book After-School Programming for At-Risk Students Clanton Harpine, 2013) teaches students to decode or break words down into individual letter sounds and then to encode or reassemble those sounds back into pronounceable words.  Vowel clustering also teaches students to build new words from a common letter sound.  There are no rules to memorize and students are never allowed to guess at a word. My vowel clustering method also teaches spelling, handwriting, oral reading fluency, comprehension, and story writing
 
Vowel clustering works with the brain and helps students relate letter sounds to their oral language system.  Vowel clustering uses visual, auditory, and hands-on teaching techniques.    Vowel clustering teaches students to match consonant and vowel sounds with their corresponding letter symbols.  This emphasizes the oral letter-sound relationship.  Remember, we are training the brain, building “pathways” in the brain.  When these neural “pathways” are developed, reading can take less than half a second.   Therefore, it is important to organize how we teach so students can organize how they learn. We want to work with the brain, not against it. Vowel clustering is a teaching approach that presents a visual and oral picture that struggling students can immediately identify with.  Visually, students match words by how they sound not by how they are spelled.  This teaches children that words can be pronounced one way but spelled another.  This visual-auditory learning technique allows students to both see and hear letter sounds (phonemes).  Vowel clustering also teaches handwriting because it is very important for students to write words correctly as they practice reading, spelling, and matching written letters to oral sounds. 
 
All of my reading programs teach vowel clustering.  Vowel clustering has been tested and proven to work with struggling, at-risk, and failing students.  A student who failed for nine years using balanced literacy and phonics, learned to read in 3 ½ years using vowel clustering.  I have even had struggling students move up four grade levels in one year using vowel clustering.  These were students who had failed multiple years in schools that taught whole language, balanced literacy, and phonics.  So yes, we can teach students to read, but to do so, we must change the methods that we use to teach reading. (see my 2019 book, After-School Programming and Intrinsic Motivation, hitting the book shelves in a couple weeks).