What is the best advice to help a ADHD child to learn to read??

Question

What is the best advice to help a ADHD child to learn to read??

Answer 1

Be sure to not try to work against his behavior - work WITH it.  It's not likely that a child w/ ADHD will learn the same way to read that his classmates or you did.  Remember that this is frustrating for the child, and the first reaction any of us have to something frustrating is "I QUIT, IT'S NOT WORTH IT!"  Tiny successes are more important than the final one - every tiny success is a chance to reward (even a "good job!").

Richard LaVoie stated once that children with ADHD do not lack in attention - it is that they lack the ability to not pay attention to everything else!  Everything in your child's perceptive field competes with everything else for your child to process.  In essence, it's like me asking you to talk on the phone, write a novel, feed a baby, and clean your house at the same time.  It's too much to process unless we can break it down into one task at a time; but we ask children with ADHD to do this, and they lack the ability!  So, eliminate distractions such as a radio, TV, face away from windows, anything that could potentially rob the child of valuable mental resources.

Want an example?  A fluent task, such as driving, can be performed well while engaging in other fluent tasks, such as talking, or listening to music.  So, you are driving down the road, talking to the other passengers, enjoying your CD.  It begins to rain in buckets, and other drivers have begun to attach their foot to their break pedals.  Do you continue talking and listening to your CD?  Not likely.  You turn down the music, and ask your passengers to "be quiet for a minute!"  Driving has become a cognitively taxing task, now that a non-fluent environment has been introduced (LaVoie).

I don't know what method you are planning to use to help this child, but I can't stress enough that reading is more than just decoding symbols on a paper - it is seeing a group of these symbols, decoding them, and knowing its meaning (both as a word and in the context of the sentence) all with minimal effort - aka FLUENCY.  Once you devote your mental resources to the task of decoding, you have none left with which to actually *understand* what you have been reading!  This is why so many children with ADHD or LD can read an entire passage (with the well known slow, stuggling pace), and when you ask them a simple question in the story, their response is "I don't know."  They simply were out of cognitive resources.  I hope this helped.  Good luck.

Answer 2

My son has adhd and aspergers and i spent a lot of time reading with him at the start he loves books and computers so i got computer games as well from the toddler stage and when we finished a book together he was rewarded with an educational computer game which worked wonders although you must restrict the time limit depending on the age my boy is now 10 and can only be on for 1hr otherwise i pay for it but the reading is good he reads every night before he goes to"bed and at the moment is halfway through guiness book of records he took 1week to read 1 harry potter book so we made it read 1 book then watch the movie which slowed him down a bit. Try to focus on subjects he likes and books with "social stories"  in them will help greatly as he starts to socialise Good luck Babs

Answer 3

First... Don't put him or her on drugs. Instead, spend as much time as you can teaching the child to read. Make the experience fun. Make it a game... and have rewards for good performance. AND never scold the child for poor behavior or performance. Always use positive reinforcement.

Answer 4

When I first began teaching, one parent just wanted ONE THING, for his/her child to read. I was teaching junior high and the child was a challenge!! As with all my students, we had a private meeting and I asked this student his goals and what he wanted to do during the upcoming school year. His response was "I want to use the same books as everyone else." I said fine. I do not want to bore you with the details but let me just say, this child's reading scores improved four grade levels in one school year!

How did I do it? First of all, there are very few people who CANNOT read! When our children are learning to talk and we oohh and ahhh over every piece of babble that come out of their mouth, we critize and chastise our child if they are creative with the illustrated story they are reading. I praised this child each time he opted to read aloud in group. I refused to allow students to correct ANY student who misread, deleted or mispronounced a word during group.

I encouraged students to READ that which they enjoyed as long as it was APPROPRIATE for a school setting.

I ALWAYS reminded the students they were competing against THEMSELVES not any one else with reading.

I played word games  where I would write a word on the board and students were given a specific amount of time to make as many words as possible from that word. I gave credit for creative spelling(I gave the correct spelling and had students use it in sentences). I kept each paper from these games and at the end of the month I would show students how they'd improved.

I personally feel, allowing reluctant readers to read what they like is better than force feeding them with material that is extremely difficult.

Finally, I have a secret weapon that works all the time!!!

Good luck!