Children Do Not Read at Twenty Feet Away: The Silent Sabotage of Children in the Classroom Will Be the Focus November 8 at UWBothell Symposium

In any Washington elementary classroom, research shows 25 percent of children may have undiagnosed vision issues that interfere with their success in school, especially in the most critical areas: reading and math.

The Silent Problem: No screening for children’s near vision is required by Washington law; schools are only required to find out if children have “20/20” vision, the ability to see at a distance of 20 feet, using a test developed during the Civil War in 1863. Children in today’s elementary schools spend about 85% of their time reading books and laptops at a distance of six to twelve inches. Teachers and parents rarely have any information at all about the vision abilities children need to perform well with schoolwork.

Change Is Coming:  A panel of experts from all over Washington -- optometrists, M.D.s, educators from K-12 and higher education, lawmakers and judges, graduate students investigating the issue, a published parent advocate, and representatives of underserved populations -- will come together to raise a red flag on this long-ignored and well-documented children’s health issue.

The Solution:  Decades ago, when the daughter of President Lyndon Baines Johnson was failing in school, she received appropriate intervention for vision issues that changed her ability to function in the classroom and in life. Luci Baines Johnson concluded:

"If good education is the key to a strong country, then good vision is the key to a good education.”

 

Let’s Fix This: Come to the Symposium on Vision and Learning

·      Saturday, November 8, 2014          9:00-4:00

·      Location: University of Washington Bothell Discovery Hall

To learn more and register, please visit www.educatingyoungeyes.xyz.

            But What About the Older Kids' Eyes?

      What about, for example, Roger?

Somehow he had learned to keep smiling, gently, with a calm regard for whatever grownup was telling him what he needed to do in this new school.

He had lost track of the new schools he had begun during the six years since he had entered his first kindergarten room. He still remembered that room, bright and colorful, with all kinds of posters and words hung on the walls and from the ceiling. The words were all written in big fuzzy red or blue letters he couldn’t read. He couldn’t read anything then, not even his name, or write. Mom couldn’t either; she wanted him to learn fast, so fast, to help her out. To help them both out.

“Roger Brokentree,” said the teacher, young and very thin. “Is that a Native American name?” she asked.

He smiled his calm smile at her, knowing the next question, ‘Is your father Native American?’ She didn’t ask it, but waited for his answer with a calm smile of her own.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I live with my mom.”

She nodded. “Welcome to our class, Roger. Hannah,” she called to another child. “Please show Roger his desk and his cubby. He is new to our school.”

It didn’t take this teacher long to find out how much Roger didn’t know; she zeroed in on him on September 30.

“Roger, I am going to arrange some extra help for you in writing. I bet you didn’t do much writing in your schools last year, since you had to change schools so often, right?” The school records had finally come; he had been in three fourth grades in three different districts as he and his mom moved from shelter to shelter. “So I am going to have you work with a volunteer, Mrs. Tweedie, while the rest of the class is writing, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Starting tomorrow.”

Roger knew about volunteers, mostly how they didn’t know how to help him. He smiled calmly and thanked her.

      Mrs. Tweedie was gentle and quiet. She understood that he needed to start with printing and gave him some paper that had lines that were black, not light blue like the notebook paper the other fifth-graders were using. Roger relaxed about a quarter of an inch. He could see these lines. Then she asked him what he would like to write.

      “Just one sentence, mind,” she said with a smile. “You can write one at a time until you can print and spell without me.” She had a pencil too, he noticed. She held it over her paper. “Tell me what you want to write.”

      No one had ever asked him what he wanted in school. He forgot to smile. Then he blurted, “I like this school so far.”

      That was his first writing. She wrote it, he copied it and read it, and she didn’t seem to mind that he needed to tilt his head and get close to the paper to see the words. She never said, as so many teachers had, “Sit up straight, Roger, so you can see what you are doing.”

      Tuesday and Thursday, one sentence, two, four, a page full; then she gave him a stiff paper with all the words he had already used on it. “You are too old to experiment with spelling,” she said in her lilting voice. “Most kids get time to invent for a year or two, like Fiona did” Fiona was her daughter, in the same class, miles ahead of Roger) “so you have to learn to spell words as you are using them.” They exchanged calm smiles. He thought, for the first time in his life, I might learn to do this. “You’re doing verrry well, Roger. English is verrry hard.”

      But the word sheet had smaller letters and he had to get even closer to see them. The teacher asked the nurse to check his vision, and he could read all the letters on the big chart on her wall. “He’s fine, 20/20,” she told Mrs. Tweedie.

      In December he learned about paragraphs. The others in his class were sharing expositions “for revision ideas,” the teacher said. He saw her talking with Mrs. Tweedie as the class went to lunch.

    “You can share with me,” said Mrs. Tweedie the next day. “And I have something for you, Roger, to try.” She pulled out a pair of glasses from her bag. “Perhaps these will help you see the words better.” They had a tag: 2.00, and  a price tag that was cut off so he couldn't see it.

      On that December day, at age 11, Roger’s life began. He could see the words. He could begin to learn. And in May, when he changed schools again, he took the drugstore glasses with him.

            During this school year, 2013-2014, I have had the delightful privilege of going to Kindergarten in Seattle every Wednesday to do Words.  I usually end up smiling all day Wednesday, although I am only in room 106 from 8:45-9:45.
            April 23 was my Wednesday date with 106 this week. “What do you want for your Word today, Russell?” I asked the least academically-inclined child.  Building with K’Nex is his life at school.  I expected that he would say “Idunno,” his usual.
            “Attack of the B Team,” he shot back. “That’s what I want.”
           Wow, I thought.  He’s hooked.
            We had begun in late September, with Movement I.  All twenty-six children and their teacher got a Word every time, and they read the Word to two friends before putting it into the basket.  At Word Circle they all read, and during the months of September, October, and November, only three children forgot one of their Words.
            Every morning before morning meeting the children read all their Words (kept in a Word pocket in the book baskets on their tables) to a friend.

            In November a few children began getting sentences, Movement II. These were generally “I likes” or “I cans,” as in “I like soccer” and I can read Harry Potter,” with a few fairly typical “I love Grandma” and a few not-so-typical, such as “My mom is coming home tomorrow.”  Even though it was once a week instead of every day, I could see progress and was pleased with the children’s ever-improving letter recognition, letter formation when they traced the Word, and sound-symbol correspondence when I asked what something started with.

            In January I began two in Movement III.  There are some very able children in this class, and there are also some entitled children, and some children fall into both groups.  As more of them took on Movement III, writing down their chosen sentences in a small book, there were some confrontation-like moments:   “No, that’s how I make that letter!” and “I just want to write one word, can I just write one word?”  I was as patient and firm as I ever was.  Mostly.
            During January, with its report-card half-days, and February with its ten-day vacation, more children were able to be in Movements II and III, and all but about eight were in Movement III by the time April break came around.  We were into  “Maria is my best friend,” and “I love soccer,” and “It’s my birthday today!”

            All very ordinary.  (No child is ordinary, I hasten to add: but many Words, in every Movement, are ideas other children often have had in other groups.)  So this morning, the first Wednesday after April break, I did something not ordinary.

            As the children came to my table this week– I tried to have three at a time – I asked what they wanted and gave a Movement III book to everyone who didn’t already have one.
            Two or three at a time, we worked.  I wrote the sentence, whatever it was, on a  strip of paper the same length and with the same lines as the paper in their books.  “I like running,” wrote Mack.  “I love my mom and dad,” wrote Lisa.  “Ellie  and me lost the same tooth,” wrote Alyna, right after Tress wrote,  “I lost my tooth this morning.”
            Six children in this class were not, I thought,  really ready but I decided to do Movement III with them anyway.  Annelise and Calvin and Emma and Nick astonished me as they copied their sentences into brand-new books, using way more controlled fine-motor skills than I expected – a few os made from the bottom, and a few backwards es – but mostly on the lines and mostly completely readable.  And were they proud or what?!
            I saved David and Russell for last.  David, who talks nearly non-stop at the best of times, gave me a story instead of a sentence (because he doesn’t know the difference yet) and we reduced it to “I like Harry Potter.”  

           And Russell?  Well, the Russells of this world are why I can’t stop Doing Words.

(This is one of several answer to the question, "What can I do at home to help my child with reading?")

The I-Read, You-Read Game

Use a book that your child is supposed to be reading for homework, or a book your child has read before, or a book your child has not read before that is at the right level.

For grade 1 and grade 2, use a Frog and Toad or other book by Arnold Lobel, or a favorite

For grade 3, use an Amelia Bedelia or a Fancy Nancy, or anything by Ezra Jack Keats, or a favorite 

For grades 4 and 5, use whatever book they are currently reading

Rules:

a.     Child reads a page to you

b.     You retell or summarize that page in a sentence (or two) out loud (not in writing)

c.      You read a page to the child

d.     The child retells or summarizes the page

Keep going until you have read for 20 minutes or until the book is finished, whichever happens first (likelier in the youngest grades to come to the end of the book first!) or until each of you has had as many turns as the child is old.

People ask me why, since I have officially retired from First Grade, why do I continue to go to school and volunteer in classrooms??

"Because," I answer, "I like to watch children growing and learning how to use their brains."

So far this year, since September 2013, I have been hanging out in three classes:  one Kindergarten, where growth is very rapid and obvious; one fourth grade, where the light bulbs flash bright-green neon when they come on; and one first grade, where the washing-machine theory of child development is clearly at work.

Washing machines have a built-in timing mechanism that tells the machine how long the water should run in, how long the clothes should swish around in it, how long the emptying and filling again and rinsing and spinning should take.  This may be clear to the mechanical mind inside the machine, but it is totally random and inexplicable to me.

When I was younger, I did my family's laundry every Saturday at the Belfast (ME) laundromat. I put the clothes in, put in all the quarters, started the four machines, and went off the the grocery store.  Thirty minutes later I put the groceries in the car and came back to the laundromat to start the dryers.

Sometimes the washers were all done.  Often, though, they weren't, so I had to wait for them to finish. Each machine's timing was different, and there was no pattern that I could discern, either for them all or for any one.  I picked one to watch.

There would be a click, and then another click, and I could see the control button shift slightly with each click; then there would be some time -- maybe a whole minute -- before the next click.  I would watch this incomprehensible progression of clicks and wait times, often for another five minutes, until at last there was one more unpredictable clock and the whole machine shuddered to a stop. 

Children learn like that, I have found, on their own timing and in their own inexplicable way. There is, of course, more similarity among four washing machines than among any four children, so watching the thirty children in my first grade move through their developmental clicks was way more complex and varied than anything mechanical. Children are more fascinating, too, than any machine could ever be.

Weren't we always admonished as children never to tattle? And somehow we internalized this admonition as a directive for life: Never squeal on someone, nor (almost never) gossip.

Now that we are grownups, and especially now that we are parents, I say, PLEASE DO TATTLE ON YOUR CHILDREN, to their teacher.

• When a twenty-minute homework assignment in math in first grade takes your child more than an hour and two or three meltdowns, TELL THE TEACHER.

• When a thirty-minute writing assignment in third grade takes your child more than two hours and a pile of tears, TELL THE TEACHER.
  

• When reading homework, at any grade, causes headaches, tears, sighs, wiggling, and many breaks for snacks, TELL THE TEACHER.

These homework behaviors are not normal and they should not be common.The children who exhibit them are not poor students, bad children, difficult or impossible kids. They are perfectly normal -- except for their vision. They can't focus on their work because they cannot see it clearly.

Imagine how you would feel if the words slid around on the page, or faded from gray to black, or went blurry for no reason.  You would want to quit doing whatever made you feel that way, and maybe you would cry and scream and shout, "I can't DO this!!"

To try to read when your eyes are not working with you is exhausting and, since children don't have any idea that it isn't like that for everyone else, they feel discouraged and stupid. And they are sure that YOU think they are too.

In fact, their eyes are not tracking or teaming properly. And they can be fixed.

Tracking is when the eyes move smoothly across the lines of print in a book or on a paper the child is reading. If the eyes jump or shift quickly either vertically or horizontally, the child cannot see clearly what she is reading and can't make sense of the words; sometimes the words  seem to be actually moving, too.

Teaming is the ability of the eyes to work together, to be able to focus on the print. Sometimes children whose eyes are not teaming report that the words move on the page, that they see double, or that the print is fading from black to gray and back again.

If your child is miserable at homework time, TELL THE TEACHER.  Then go find a developmental optometrist and get your child some help.