reading comp | ADHD Information

Any of your kids have trouble reading and answering questions?   How do you help them.  I mean older kids with detailed reading that sometimes is very boring and hard to focus on.  My son has NO problem when the subject interests him but he just can't focus on it if he's not interested.  I guess we all are that way but most of us can force ourselves when we have to.

We just paid to have him tested at Huntington Learning centers and are considering getting him extra help in that area.

 my daughter is exactly as you described.  we are especially seeing poor grades on the weekly readers that her classroom does together, they take turn reading/popcorn reading they call it and i think she probably just pays attention to whose turn it is/who is reading vs. what they are reading about. 

she's a great reader...reads a lot, but is having some comprehension problems, depending upon what it is it that she's reading it seems.

shelley

oh, i'm back to add, it also seems like my daughter is having some trouble interpreting graphs.  we're working on this with her a bit:)  

 

shelley 

My son is in Grade 6. He can read words well. His reading comprehension level is at Grade 2 or 3. I am currently buying him some workbooks recommended by his teacher. He has to read the story and answer questions.

Also I find that as they get older, they require the kids to really read "between the lines"....for some of our kids, they tend to think in the concrete and while they can tell you every detail of the plot, they have such trouble inferring things that are not necessarily written down.  Things like themes. 

My son just failed a test on a novel that and he couldn't write the essay because they weren't asking him what happened in story, but rather the message the author was trying to convey.

I don't know how they teach these skills

My son is the same way.  That's one of his major problems in school.  So what does the school do to help him??Sorry, i forgot to answer that.  we actually have a meeting with them next friday to go over different ways to help him with the comprehension, etc.  I will let you know what they come up with.What grade is he in??He is in 3rd grade.  While he can read fluently for a 3rd grader, he is on a first grade comprehension level.  He can't even verablly express or write down what has happened in a story - unless it's sports related and it something he has a major interest in.    I actually can't believe thought that his 2nd grade teacher never discovered that and it's ashame we couldn't help him earlier.

Mellowdancer, what you said about reading between the line made me think of myself in high school.  I never saw the same themes and messages that everyone else did.  Of course, I saw them after people pointed them out, but it still made me want to slam my head into a wall for missing obvious things.  However, the majority of my teachers thought that it was great that I was bringing a different perspective into it.  I wonder if they thought I was looking for something different on purpose?

 

My son didn't have a problem with this until this year (3rd grade), when they started having assignments that were multiple paragraphs long.  We had a neuropsych eval done last spring, so we knew that he did not have a learning disability and his reading comp. scores were very average.  The school wasn't really helpful, other than saying to "keep practicing".  

So, I finally showed his eval. to a special ed. teacher I know and she said, since there wasn't any other problems it was all due to attention/focus.  She explained that the reading comprehension component of the Woodcock Johnson (the test they gave him) invovles reading a three sentance passage that contains a blank, and the child has to fill in the blank and understand what he read.  She said based on the fact that he could understand/retain small chunks of info that we should break down all his reading assignment into small 3-4 sentance chunks.  At the end of each chunk make a colored dot with a marker so he knows to stop, then ask him a specific ? about what he read (which he has to answer in a full sentance) and record the answer on a peice of paper.  By the end of the assignment you have a summary in his own words for him to refer back to in order to complete the questions assigned by the teacher.  I always make sure that I've read the questions he has to answer first so I know what to draw his attention to when asking him questions.

This is very tedious and requires prep by the parent or teacher, but it does work.  We've been doing it for a month now and he actually asks "can you do that question thing with me?" when he pulls out his reading homework.

I haven't yet talked to the school about them having him do that in the classroom, we were hoping that once we found the right med/dosage it wouldn't be necessary.  However our doctor informed us that we can't go any higher on the meds (which otherwise work great) because he's lost a couple of pounds.  I really hate to create more work for his teacher as she has 28 kids in her class, but I'm not really seeing a way around it.

Anyway, I hope that helps some, even if just to give you ideas.

Yes, that was very helpful.  I actually tried something similar to that.  Unfotunately, the volume of a 7th grade reading selection is a lot more than a 3rd grade reading selection so it can be very time consuming.

I don't have add but found it very hard to focus on some of the reading pieces he gets.