The third letter in my series answering parents' questions talks about the difference between my two reading programs. 
 
Question #3:  What is the difference between Camp Sharigan and the Reading Orienteering Club?  Does my child need to attend both?
 
Camp Sharigan is a 10-hour, one-week program.  The Reading Orienteering Club is a year-long after-school program.  Both programs meet for 2-hour sessions.  Both use 6 different teaching methods and 14 therapeutic interventions, and both programs stress phonemic awareness (identifying letter sounds) through vowel clustering.  Vowel clustering is a method that teaches children to break words down into letter sounds or phonemes and then put those sounds back together as words to be read and pronounced correctly.  Vowel clustering does not use memorization or (old style) phonics rules.  Children study the letter sounds in vowel clusters—meaning that they study all of the sounds for a vowel at one time.  For example, there are seven different sounds used by the letter A, and 22 different letter combinations used to make these sounds.  Studying vowel sounds in a cluster helps train the brain to organize the sounds. 
 
They are both group-centered prevention programs that fully use group interaction and cohesion.  Both programs feature workstations and individual rotation within the group structure.  Camp Sharigan has 10 workstations and the Reading Orienteering Club has eight.  The difference lies in the intensity of the year-long after-school program.  Neither program stops with just phonemic awareness; both programs also stress phonological awareness (the ability to work with letter sounds).  It is not enough to merely identify phonemes.  Children must be able to distinguish between similar and dissimilar phonemes, separate words into syllables, match sound vs. spelling, blend sounds, and manipulate sounds to form new words.  We play a game called “add a letter/take away a letter.”  The children add and take away letters to make new words and sometimes even change the letter sounds being used.  By “playing with words,” children learn that it is the way letters are combined in a word that produce the pronunciation of the word.  Both programs also stress hands-on learning, oral reading, spelling, vocabulary building, dictionary skills, comprehension building skills, letter recognition and handwriting skills, reading fiction and non-fiction, story writing, fluency, and social skills in the classroom.  Fluency is taught in both programs through oral reading as a puppeteer and puppet reader.  The Reading Orienteering Club also uses a make-believe TV show where the children research and read the report that they have written on the subjects being studied.
 
The group-centered nature of the program provides the learning atmosphere; the workstation style hands-on curriculum emphasizing creative art therapy provides the curriculum.  The counseling component of the program helps children learn how to work together cooperatively, make decisions, solve problems, and rebuild their self-efficacy (the child’s belief that they can learn to read).
 
The main difference between the two programs is the length of time.  The Reading Orienteering Club provides help for students who need more than a mere one-week, 10-hour program.  Both programs use intrinsic (internal) motivation and strive to return children to the classroom so that they can be successful.
 

Neuroimaging research is showing clear, irrefutable evidence that whole language, “look say,” guessing, memorizing word lists, and especially, Reading Recovery, simply do not teach children to read.  So, why do we keep clinging to methods that do not work?  A prospective teacher asked me just the other day: “What am I supposed to do?  I’m paying sky-high tuition to learn a method that doesn’t work.”  All I could say was, “Yes and we’ve known that it doesn’t work for over 16 years.”  An important study by Yoncheva, Wise, and McCandliss, published in the journal Brain and Language, shows why phonemic awareness is better.
 
As Yoncheva, Wise, and McCandliss explain through their research on the effectiveness of whole language teaching methods vs. phonemic awareness, sounding words out by letter sounds (decoding phonemes) allows children to learn to read faster and more effectively, and even to learn new words that the child has never encountered before. They state that it is much better to teach a child to sound out the word c-a-t than to teach a child to memorize the word cat or to guess at the word cat from a picture. 
 
I explain what phonemic awareness is, and how to teach phonemic awareness, in my new book, Teaching At-Risk Students to Read: The Camp Sharigan Method. If we really want to teach children to read, we must teach phonemic awareness, not memorization.  Over 60% of children across the nation are failing in reading right now using whole language—memorize word lists-type methods.  It’s time for a change.  We need to adopt a teaching method that actually works.

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Commercial entry level or beginning reading books usually have 4 or 5 different vowel sounds on the first page.  Students who are struggling to read, or have a long history of reading failure, are overwhelmed when faced with multiple vowel sounds.  Struggling students cannot learn that many sounds at one time.  The brain simply does not process letter sounds by hopping around from one to the other.  The brain clusters sounds.  When phonemic instruction jumps around from one sound to another, struggling students become confused and frustrated.  The vowel clustering technique that I use in my reading programs, such as Camp Sharigan, teaches children to build words by using letter sounds.  For example, I start with AT by simply changing the consonant sounds:  bat, cat, hat.  The child gains confidence by sounding out the words and reading: “The cat spat at the rat.”  If your child is struggling, you can do this at home.  If you need help, click the email icon above.

Listening to a child read out loud is very good, but simply reading out loud will not teach a child to read.  Children must learn how to use letter sounds (phonemes).  Read more in my book:  Group-Centered Prevention Programs for At-Risk Students (2011). 

I write a column for The Group Psychologist that answers letters from teachers, school psychologists, and other group professionals.  However, I also often receive letters from parents.  So, I’m answering letters from parents here.  If you have a question, please contact me at the email link above. (Also see my earlier answer to Question #1.)
 
Question #2:  Last summer, the school sent home a letter for one of my children to be in a summer reading program.  Both of my children need help, but the school said only one could come.  They didn’t take the child that needed the most help.  Why did they not take both of my children?
 
The program that you are referring to is called Reading Recovery.  It has been around for well over 15 years, but, unfortunately, research does not support that it has ever been especially effective.  As a matter of fact, the national Department of Education states that over 60% of third graders across the nation cannot read at grade level during the period while whole language and programs like Reading Recovery have been used in the schools. 

Reading Recovery is also a very selective program; they typically take only children who they think can succeed.  Children who are struggling at a lower level are rarely ever selected.  That is why one child was selected and not both.

Reading Recovery does introduce phonics, but it relies mostly on old-style phonics rules and uses a somewhat disorganized approach for teaching phonics.  One research study even stated that improvement by students in the program was “almost zero” (Elbaum et al., 2000).  Other researchers have found major retention problems with the Reading Recovery approach.  Children seem to improve for a while, and then they become confused and start failing again. A group of more than 30 major reading researchers wrote an open letter to express their concern about Reading Recovery.

The big problem with Reading Recovery, as with whole language and “look say” methods, is that they all work from the faulty principle that reading is a “natural process,” that students will just normally learn to read if they receive enough exposure to literature.  Unfortunately, this myth has been disproved many times over the past 20 years.  The National Reading Panel, which published a nationwide study in 2000, states that whole language and other methods following these principles simply do not work.  The Reading Panel studied over 100,000 programs.  The Reading Panel concluded that reading must be taught and that phonemic awareness (not phonics rules) is the key.  Reading is not naturally acquired through exposure as spoken language is.  Unless you can memorize the entire unabridged dictionary, memorizing word lists will never teach a child to read effectively.  Children must learn that letters represent sounds, and they must learn how to decode or break words down into letter sounds, then put those sounds back together and say or pronounce the word. 

For more research on methods that work with students who are struggling in reading, look at my book:  After-School Prevention Programs for At-Risk Students:  Promoting Engagement and Academic Success.  It’s available in paperback. Many community libraries carry it or can secure a copy for you to read. You can also read an excellent article by Lorraine Hammond. She explains some of the problems with Reading Recovery.

You are right to question programs that do not seem to be working.  Often, it’s because they are not. 


It is sad that public schools cling to Reading Recovery even when it has been proven not to work.  Parents must go to their school administrators and request a more research-based program.  Unfortunately, there are also many universities training tomorrow’s teachers that are also still teaching the outdated and ineffective Reading Recovery program.  It is definitely time for a change.

To end poverty, we need education.  The better educated children and teens are, the better will be their quality of life.  Poverty can be overcome through effective education.  Reading is essential for quality education.  At present, the Department of Education states that about 64% of children across the nation cannot read at grade level by 4th grade.  We need to change how we teach children to read.
 
Failure is unacceptable, especially when we have the means to teach children to read.  Children must be taught phonemic awareness before they can learn to read; research has proven that we have effective methods for teaching phonemic awareness.  Whole language, “look say,” and other methods that use memorization of word lists do not teach phonemic awareness.  If your child is being sent home with a list of words to memorize each week, go to your school administration and ask that they change how they are teaching reading. 
 

I have received several questions about my reading programs, so I plan to spend some time answering them.  I plan to add a question each month, so, if you have a question that you would like to ask, please feel free to contact me at the email link above.
 
Question #1:  “Why do you spend so much time teaching children the alphabet?  Isn’t this a reading program?”
 
Both of my reading programs, Camp Sharigan and the Reading Orienteering Club after-school program, emphasize both phonemic and phonological awareness.  This means that they emphasize learning that letters represent sounds, often several sounds.  We teach children to break words down (decode) into individual phonemes or sounds and then put those individual sounds back together (encode) and say or pronounce the word.  Children are also taught to spell the word, learn definitions for each word, and to be able to use the word in a sentence.
 
We also play games by adding a letter or taking a letter away to make a new word:  at becomes bat, bat becomes back.  Unfortunately, many children who come to my reading program do not know the lowercase alphabet.  They cannot identify or name the lower case letters.  Why?  Mostly because we teach capital and lowercase letters side-by-side in preschool and kindergarten.  That is why children never learn to identify lowercase letters when they are used by themselves.  Yet, we read using lowercase alphabet letters.  So, we must start teaching children who struggle or have been labeled as at-risk or failing in reading by teaching the lowercase alphabet.
 
We also know from neuroimaging research that the brain needs not only to “look and see” the letter, but to learn as children write and shape the letter.  I use manuscript paper and manuscript style writing tools because, if the child’s brain cannot recognize the letter that the child has written, it will not be able to read the alphabet letter.  I use traditional “tracing with direction arrows” for practice.  I give the students colored pencils (especially the erasable kind) and have them trace over and over a letter with different colors to see what color they can make.  Adding a little fun makes a task more enjoyable.  Then, I also have the children use manuscript writing paper for writing their captured words (new words or words that they do not know).  As I tell the children, “we’re training our brains to recognize these letters so that the brain can identify the letters when we see them in a story.”

The first step to teaching a child to read is to teach the lowercase alphabet:  (1) to recognize the lowercase letter (independent of the capital letters) and know the letter name, (2) to know the letter sound(s) for each lowercase letter, and (3) to be able to write the lowercase letters correctly using manuscript style paper and letter formation.