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Reading Tools

Your Teaching Budget Demands Results, See-N-Read® Delivers

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The students you care for have various challenges and the budget to address those challenges is hardly unlimited. You need the most effective tools for your money to ensure the integrity of your educational program.

See-N-Read® Reading Tools are your patented (U.S. Patent 7,954,444) solution to assist children with reading challenges. Through years of research and careful testing, our dedicated learning specialists have created tools that are proven to help children with difficult reading Fluency and comprehension issues.

See-N-Read®  Learning Tools’ team is dedicated to studying and solving reading comprehension and fluency problems in people of all levels, from child to adult. We understand that the solutions offered in traditional reading comprehension programs do not necessarily address readers who respond differently to certain stimuli. We also understand the devastating effects that misdiagnosing children with a disorder or disability can have on their self-esteem. Our tools are research-based and classroom tested; addressing physical and cognitive anomalies in order to improve reading speed and comprehension while stabilizing learners’ confidence by enhancing success.

Our tools are easy-to-use, requiring virtually no training time for teachers or students…Simply Lay It on the Page and Read™. The learning curve for our tools is not disruptive – you will be able to apply it almost instantly within your normal curriculum. We have created See-N-Read® to easily integrate into your program at any point during the year. If you find that traditional methods are not working for your students, do not hesitate to add our proven tools at any point in time and in any curriculum. Your students will keep pace with ongoing materials and you will close the gap between traditional and nontraditional learners more quickly.

In short, if you are a teacher on a budget, See-N-Read® is the reading (or study) aid for you. You can visit us at our website for more information on our reading and study tools and the research that went into their development. We are also happy to talk to you about any questions you may have. We look forward to helping you bring your students to new levels of competence and confidence!

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4 Common Mistakes Homeschoolers Make When Teaching Reading (and how to avoid them)

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Homeschoolers are often proficient readers, simply because of the one on one attention and wealth of resources. There are a few common errors made by homeschool parents when it comes to reading; these are easily corrected in most cases. High expectations, or pushing for too much, too soon can make a child that is progressing beautifully feel like they are not “getting it” quickly enough, despite their promising progress.

Trying to adhere to a strict school schedule can also cause your child to avoid reading; it could also hinder their progress. The beauty of homeschooling is that you can teach your child on the schedule and system that works best for them and foster a love of reading that will last a lifetime.

Too Much, Too Soon

For many parents, homeschooling is a way to feed the needs of a child who loves to learn, and by teaching reading early, they feel they can give their child a good head start. While early reading does happen naturally for some kids, pushing for too much, too soon can backfire.

One of the best things about homeschooling is the ability to work at a pace that is right for your child and to incorporate play, critical thinking and other early learning elements into your day. A child that is struggling may have an actual issue – or may simply not be ready to read just yet.

Homeschool styles vary, but focusing on content in which your child is interested and fostering a love of reading by using picture books, stories and reading aloud together can help him learn habits that will serve him well in the future.

Following a School Schedule – Outside of School

Some kids need a fixed routine, but trying to mimic a school schedule at home may not work when it comes to reading. A typical lesson may take up to an hour in school, since there are 20 or more kids in the average classroom. Stretch your reading lessons out for that long and you could have a mutiny on your hands.

Instead of planning your day around what a class full of children does, plan around your own schedule and preferences. If everyone is up early, placing reading at the start of the day and taking the time needed to complete the lesson you’ve chosen is enough.

Some kids will finish a single lesson in a few minutes, while others may need a little longer, but cramming too much into each day could backfire and even impact how much your child enjoys reading. Choosing a curriculum and pacing it to match your child’s needs, makes it easy for her to learn to read – and to love reading, too.

Missing the Signs of a Reading Problem

Some kids just read a little later than others – but some do struggle with attention disorders, eye control, dyslexia and other conditions that can make it more difficult to become a fluent reader and later, a proficient writer. A teacher who has been in the elementary classroom for a few years sees hundreds of kids and can usually spot the signs of trouble early.

If you are homeschooling and teaching your child for the first time, it is easy to think that slow progress is your fault, or the way reading works for homeschooled kids. While you don’t want to push or rush, you should be aware of stalled progress and take steps to research potential issues.

Using the Same System for Each Child

The system or curriculum that worked for your oldest may be perfect for the next in line, or they could struggle with it. Each child learns differently, even in the same family; by exploring different methods and using supportive technology or devices as needed, you can ensure each kid gets the same love of reading, even if they get there in a slightly different way.

Learning more about some of the common roadblocks experienced by homeschoolers when it comes to reading can help you create a program that resonates with your child – and you may need different supports and approaches for each child in your family. One of the great joys of teaching is watching your child master reading, and knowing you’ve given them a skill that will last a lifetime.

Improve Reading Comprehension, Improve Reading Skill

What Happens to the Brain When You Have Reading Difficulties

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According to the experts at Reading Rockets, it is estimated that about 10 million children worldwide experience some degree of difficulty when learning to read. However, roughly 90 percent of those kids eventually overcome their struggles altogether – provided they receive the appropriate type of training at an early age.

This tells us a number of fascinating things. For starters, there is no “one size fits all” approach to reading. Different kids always learn in different ways. Beyond that, it also suggests that whether or not a person has reading difficulties – along with how they will eventually overcome them – has less to do with the technique itself and is more about how the human brain was designed to visually process information in the first place.

Reading Difficulties and the Brain: What You Need to Know

According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, studies have shown that a person’s ability to read is actually tied to certain areas of their brain in a number of fascinating and important ways. As readers become more active when they get older, the automatic recognition center of their brains becomes more active.

This suggests that the ability to read is essentially cyclical – as reading frequency increases, a person gets better at it, which ultimately supports the ability to do it even more.

Brain scans have suggested that people who have difficulty reading also have trouble accessing this automatic recognition center in their brain. Instead, they rely more closely on the phoneme center and the mapping center of their brains to process the words they see on a page.

This naturally takes a longer amount of time to do, which is why poor readers are typically also slow readers. This can be incredibly frustrating to such readers in a way that is not entirely their fault. It also explains why many students begin to exhibit signs and symptoms of reading disabilities at an early age.

The Benefits of Learning Tools

The See-N-Read® MemoryMark™ tool is just one example of a learning tool that supports a person’s ability to read by supporting the natural way their brain is trying to work. This tool’s design is rooted in the fact that, for someone with reading difficulties, staying on the proper line and recognizing words do not happen automatically.

The See-N-Read® MemoryMark™ tool helps readers maintain focus on the proper line of text and enables them to easily re-read text without losing their place. It has a cut out clear window that allows highlighting or underlining of key words or phrases without moving the tool off of the page. This, in turn, supports readers as they rely more heavily on the phoneme center of their brains, enabling them to process meaning and context at their own pace.  Mental energy is spent on comprehending meaning instead of on keeping the place or deciphering individual words.

Additional research has suggested that, over time, this type of support (along with other techniques like phonemic awareness) actually leads to an increase in a person’s ability to automatically recognize words as they see them. A tool like MemoryMark™ will actually support those with reading difficulties by using the way the human brain works to strengthen the recognition center, slowly reducing the effects of those reading difficulties over time.

The Department of Health and Human Services also reported that after undergoing additional training, the brain images of people who once had significant reading difficulties slowly began to resemble scans of people who have always been good readers.

To that end, these types of learning tools don’t just make it easier for a person to mitigate the issues associated with their reading problems – they make it possible to slowly overcome those problems altogether.

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Dyslexia vs. Struggling to Read Correctly

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Kids struggle with reading for a variety of reasons, from difficulties with processing to attention issues like ADHD that prevent a child from truly focusing on the task at hand. Understanding which issue is triggering the difficulty can help you come up with strategies that help the struggling reader succeed and make the most of their abilities.

If you suspect that a disability like dyslexia is involved, it is important to encourage the child’s family to seek out an evaluation by a professional. If diagnosed, specific strategies designed to help people with this condition can be incorporated into your teaching and routine. Since dyslexia impacts performance in a variety of ways, a reader with this condition may not improve with the strategies you’d typically use.

Learning more about dyslexia can help you to aid a struggling reader in the classroom and at home.

What is Dyslexia?

More than just a simple reversal of letters or numbers, dyslexia is a brain based issue that causes a child to wrestle with spelling, writing, reading and even speaking. With this condition, students strain to process or identify some types of information, from identifying letter sounds or the actual symbols to understanding blends and comprehending what they are reading.

Dyslexia can’t be outgrown or cured, but accommodations can be made via an IEP (individualized education plan) to help students with this condition. Some states have laws designed to protect students with dyslexia that offer more than the Federal IDEA law and can be used to assist students diagnosed with this learning disability.

Signs of Dyslexia

  • The most well-known symptom is letter reversal
  • Above-average difficulty pairing letters with sounds or matching sounds to letters
  • Switching beginning sounds when pronouncing words or phrases, like using “mawn lower” in place of “lawn mower” in conversation
  • Trouble reading aloud or grouping phrases or words
  • Inability or difficulty with sounding out new words
  • Difficulties with handwriting or getting letters in the wrong order when writing
  • Trouble with rhymes and rhyming words

Learning How to Read vs Dyslexia

A child who is wrestling with a new concept or process will likely learn it eventually; a child with dyslexia may not unless strategies designed to particularly target that condition are used. As a child with dyslexia works and struggles to process and comprehend words, his inability to pair letters with sounds or sounds with letters stands in the way of improvement.

Getting Help for a Struggling Reader

One of the most difficult things about helping readers is determining which kids are simply in the process of discovering new concepts and/or finding their best learning style and which children are actually coping with a disability or condition that impacts the way that they learn.

Providing support for a developing reader is an ideal first step, with strategies designed to engage and help a new reader “get it”. Simple changes like reading aloud each day and incorporating a research-based tool such as the See-N-Read® reading strip to isolate specific text without hiding the rest of the passage can help the developing reader succeed and may have a positive impact on the child with dyslexia.

If traditional, tried and true strategies are simply not working and the child is working hard but making little progress, it may be time to look at the possibility of a learning disability like dyslexia. Diagnosis of a condition like this will not only make it easier for the child to learn in a supportive environment, it will provide key protections and opportunities under IDEA and any dyslexia-specific state laws.

Understanding the signs of dyslexia and why some kids cannot improve without specific strategies and intervention can enable teachers to help struggling readers succeed. Learning more about “invisible” disabilities like dyslexia provides teachers with more tools to ensure success and help those students who are struggling with reading to succeed.

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Visual Processing Disorder: What You Can Do To Help

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There is much more involved in vision than just being able to see words or pictures. The brain must also coordinate eye movements so both eyes see the same thing at once, perform complex activities like interpreting forms and perceiving spatial relations, plus be able to identify different parts that make up a whole. These examples offer a clearer idea of how visual processing works. Each day, students are bombarded with complex visual data to sort out: images, numbers or words and so on. Children with a type of visual processing disorder have difficulty taking in all that imagery and making sense of it.

Schools check for vision acuity on a regular basis but may fail to consider specific processing challenges that affect learning. As an educator, you have the ability to identify visual processing disorders and help manage them to improve learning.

What is Visual Processing Disorder?

Visual processing disorder is an umbrella term for conditions that affect how the brain processes visual information. You can break these disorders down into different categories:

  • Form discrimination – Being able to tell the difference between a circle and a square, for example. This is critical in every aspect of learning. A child who can’t discern shapes won’t know an “A” from a “B” or the number “1” from “2”.
  • Size discrimination – Another essential for reading because often capital and lower case letters look the same
  • Spatial relations – This refers to the ability to perceive letters in their correct position. For example, this child may not see the letter “q” correctly because it dips lower than the other letters in the words. It may seem to float away from the line and be separate from the word.
  • Synthesis – This is the ability to see that different parts fit together to create something whole. Consider a drawing of a house. A child with this form of visual processing disorder may see squares that are windows, a rectangle that is a door and a triangle roof but will fail to visually combine them to see the house.
  • Analysis – Analysis is the reverse of synthesis. This child sees the house but not the individual shapes that make it up.
  • Visual closure – For most people, the brain has an uncanny ability to fill the holes and find closure. A sentence missing a definite article still comes together because the brain fills in that empty space. In some cases, the brain has limited ability to find that closure. The sentence missing a “the” fails to register as a sentence, for example, or a picture of a house without a door becomes unrecognizable.

How to Recognize Visual Processing Disorder?

Ultimately, the final diagnosis should come from a specialist, but teachers can look for clues of visual processing disorders such as:

  • Difficulty telling similar letters apart
  • Clumsiness
  • Trouble focusing on an assignment or on visual presentations
  • Difficulty writing words, sentences or stories (not age appropriate). The handwriting might be messy, with letters going off the lines or in the wrong place
  • Confuses math signs
  • Poor memory
  • Trouble researching
  • Seems to get lost in the material

Finding the right classroom tools can help. The See-N-Read® reading strip, for example, provides focal points for students as they read while blocking out unnecessary visual information while ColorTag can improve recall. Paper with raised lines aids students to improve their handwriting, as well.

Not every child who has a hard time reading has a visual processing disorder but, after you rule out the need for glasses, it’s time to look for other reasons they are struggling to comprehend. With proper evaluation and the right learning tools, students with visual processing challenges can learn and succeed.

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Reading is One Thing, Retaining is Another: How to Help Students Remember What They Read

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Literacy, at its core, is about more than just being able to read and write. It’s also about being able to understand what you’re reading. Part of this has to do with retention – you may understand all of the words in the previous sentence, but if they seemingly evaporate from your brain soon after you read them as if they were never there, did you really get any value out of reading them at all?

Many students across the country have difficulties with reading retention, which ultimately sets up an important roadblock to their ability to read and learn. According to a study conducted by the Literacy Project Foundation, roughly 45 million people across the country are functionally illiterate – meaning that they read below a fifth grade level.

Twenty percent of Americans read below the level required to earn a living wage. In the California school system alone, 25 percent of students can’t perform basic reading skills. This is a major contributor to the more than 8,000 students who drop out of high school every day.

Solving a Modern Day Challenge

The most important thing to understand about retention and reading difficulties is that every student is different from the next. Not everyone processes information in exactly the same way. The reason one student has trouble retaining what they’re reading could be entirely different from a similar student – even if they’re displaying similar symptoms of a problem.

As a result, you need to consider the situation using a truly flexible approach – one that allows you to pivot your approach based on what your student needs to break through his unique barriers. This is one of the many reasons why assistive methods such as See-N-Read® Learning Tools are so important – they provide flexible solutions that can be applied to problems on an individualized basis.

Not Reading Tools – Learning Tools

The See-N-Read® MemoryMark™ tool, for example, is a reading tool that enables students to focus on the proper line and also highlight key passages of text to allow for easy re-reading – all without moving the tool off the chosen line of text. This helps establish text as an anchor point, making sure that they can isolate ideas and emphasize important passages to improve the long-term retention of information without interrupting the natural flow that they’ve developed.

This all has a positive snowball effect: students learn to single out key passages and to identify essential points while continuing to read at the pace that works best for them. They develop the ability to recognize main ideas on which they should focus, both improving their ability to retain what they read and honing their critical thinking skills.

This simple assistive tool for reading and taking notes helps users to recognize the context of the passage they’re reading. They learn to expand and build on concepts, not just to read faster or remember more information, but to develop their thinking and learning strategies and improve the quality of what they’re remembering as well.

This is just one example of a tool that can help kids remember what they’ve read. It’s safe to say that whatever steps you take that support a student’s ability to combat reading deficiencies on their own terms and to retain what they’ve read  are worthwhile steps indeed.