Bumpy reading

[Ausmumof3]

My dd8 is reading fairly well now but still has a couple of small issues.

 

When she reads aloud she tends to kind of bump through unfamiliar words. She gets the word right but sounds like she is kind of blending as she goes? It's not terrible but I'm worried it might become a habit.

[Guest]

I started targeting this issue separately from other things a few months ago.

 

But my son does this when he is just speaking, not only when he reads. He pauses inside of words and sometimes makes like a half an exhale before he goes on, usually his eyes move around when he does it, like he's thinking.

 

Anyway, I am hoping that working on it irt reading will improve it with regular speech.

 

Rhyming poetry is particularly useful. I remind him to look at each word and try to "hear" it in his head before he says it. I remind him to say it all at once, and to say each individual sound clearly--he OFTEN lets ending sounds just drop off the face of the planet into outer space, so that hat sounds like heh, dog sounds like daw, etc. I read two lines in a slightly over the top way and tell him to try to sound exactly like me. Two (rhyming) lines at a time.

 

So far so good. I do see progress being made, it's just a habit he's had for a long long time. He had a slight speech impediment when he first began speaking. I reckon this is the last of the hammering that out smooth...

 

A friend did once mention to me after meeting him, though, that it is possible that his mind is trying to move on to the next thing before the first thing gets all the way out, so he ends up back-tracking halfway. I can see that, but the cure, so to speak, is going to be the same regardless of the cause, so we just keep working on it two lines at a time.