Michael Misha's List: Reading

• Traci said introducing Derek to books that piqued his interests seemed to be one of the best ways to, not only improve his reading skills, but help him develop an interest in reading.

  "To get him to want to read, I have to find things that are interesting for him to read," Traci said. "He now reads on his own if he feels like it."

• Event Related Potentials (or ERPs)
• As soon as listeners hear an unexpected word, their brain generates a specific ERP, the N400 effect (so named because it is a negative deflection peaking around 400 milliseconds). And even more interesting, this ERP will usually occur before the word is even finished being spoken.

• People can also learn to read non-alphabetic writing systems with the same degrees of efficiency and effectiveness as readers of alphabetic scripts. This means we have evolved with nervous systems that can go from visual symbol to meaning without first going through sound. Perhaps the alphabetic symbols C-A-T could also be read as a visual sign which means "cat" , just as readers of Chinese must do?
• It makes more sense to teach the phonic knowledge, which the "decode-to-sound-first" theorists think is vital in the context of learning to write rather than in the context of learning to read.

• • What is the SCIENTIFIC evidence that this program is working?
    What is the likelihood that students who make it to the 50th percentile maintain that level of performance long term?
    How does this program effect students' love of reading?
    How long do students usually stay in the program?
• Response to Intervention (RTI), a national initiative that also focuses on other academic and behavioral areas
• Teachers test all elementary students with a one-minute oral reading test and places the lowest 20 percent in each grade level in small groups aimed at improving their reading fluency, comprehension or phonics skills.

  Groups of three to six students meet for about 20 minutes four days a week during study hall or silent reading time. They work with RTI coordinators and classroom teachers on basic reading skills like vowel combinations, sight words and finding the main idea in stories.

  Students are screened weekly to chart progress, and are usually discharged after they meet requirements for the 50th percentile of their grade level for three weeks in a row.

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