A post by Dr. Diana Sharp

(1) We got this game for our 7-year-old daughter who is struggling with her reading. She loves the game and her reading has improved significantly since she started playing the game. Our 5 year old also loves it.

(2) One of my areas of interest is struggling readers, so as far as I can tell, I am also really liking the adaptability of the game for older readers who might be struggling. It is such a challenge to find age appropriate materials that also match ability level for readers who continue to struggle into the upper grades – this seems like a game a 6th grader would enjoy as well as a 5 year old.

Most of the ItzaBitza user comments I see on Amazon or other sites describe how children ages four to six enjoy the game, so comments like the two above really catch my eye.

Struggling to Read Builds Roadblocks to Learning

I wrote in an earlier post about how important it is to consider children’s temperaments as one of the factors that can affect their early reading success. It’s also become clear to me lately that researchers need to learn more about how to overcome the emotional side effects that children who struggle with reading can experience.

When we were designing ItzaBitza, we looked for ways that we could use the technology to take away the frustration that some early readers start associating with books. After all, if you’re a kindergartner or first grader reading a book, and you can’t figure out a word, and there’s no one to help you, you can get stuck. And that’s frustrating.

What we didn’t spend much time discussing then – in part because we hadn’t read much scientific research on it – is how this kind of frustration can build for struggling readers, so that they develop additional roadblocks to learning. When that happens, and you have a child in second grade or beyond who’s still struggling, then you, the parent or teacher, now have three problems:

(1) You have to figure out why the child had trouble with the kind of beginning reading instruction he or she got

(2) You have to find a different way to teach the child the beginning skills needed

and also

(3) You have to overcome the negative emotions that the child now associates with reading because of those earlier failures, which includes finding a way to keep the child from getting even more frustrated.

This last one is not some touchy-feely problem to overcome; it’s as much a cognitive and skills-related problem as learning the letter sounds.

Shame, the Dark Heart of Reading Difficulties

Why? Two reasons:

(1) Think of the amount of attention you have as water in a bucket. Every beginning reader, whether a new reader or an older, struggling one, needs to devote lots of attention resources (water) when reading text, and you only have a certain amount in your bucket. Emotions that cause thoughts like “I hate this, this is hard, I’m stupid” use up lots of these attention resources, making it impossible for the child to devote the amount of cognitive attention needed. It’s like watering an oak tree with a teaspoon of water: it’s not going to work.

(2) It’s important to learn phonics skills, but researchers also agree that the amount of reading a child does plays a huge role in the development of reading comprehension. If children have negative emotions associated with reading, they won’t choose to do it, and they won’t read enough to develop fluency and comprehension skills.

The best place I’ve found for understanding this emotional side to reading skill development is the “Children of the Code” website, where they’ve collected video interviews with top researchers in the field.

At first the title of the video collection on this topic may seem a little melodramatic: “Shame, the Dark Heart of Reading Difficulties”.

But once you watch the clips of children and hear from the researchers, it’s hard to dismiss the importance of the problem. I especially encourage you to watch the clips – particularly those under the “cognitive disabling” label – if you have or work with children older than first grade who have struggled with reading all along.

http://www.childrenofthecode.org/Tour/c3c/index.htm

If you have experiences with your own “older” struggling reader and ItzaBitza or ItzaZoo, please share them with our team. (I put “older” in quotes because I admit it’s a bit strange to think of even a 7 year old as old. But these days, by age 7 a child might already have experienced a significant amount of reading failure.) I’m beginning to think that the anti-frustration factors designed into ItzaBitza and ItzaZoo, combined with all the fun factors and laughter, may be even more important than we first thought. And I’d love to find out more.