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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
If memorising is doing the work, the part that should be doing it never gets a turn. So build short pieces of practice where the workaround is simply not available: unfamiliar words, no picture, nothing to recall. Keep those sessions apart from anything being marked, and explain why you are doing it, because from the inside it feels like being made worse at something you had finally managed.
So truly where there is hardship there is also ease (Quran 94:5). Worth saying to a child in the middle of the hard stretch, since the difficulty here is the work itself rather than a sign that it is going wrong.
الشرح
فَإِنَّ مَعَ ٱلۡعُسۡرِ يُسۡرًا
So truly where there is hardship there is also ease
Qur’an 94:5read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of children's executive function training found the trained skill reliably improves while untrained skills do not, which is the general shape of the argument here: what gets practised is what develops. That work is about training programmes rather than about withholding a compensation strategy, so it supports the principle and not this particular method. Treat it as reasonable practice rather than as an evidenced technique.
Kassai R, Futo J, Demetrovics Z, Takacs ZK. (2019). A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence on the near- and far-transfer effects among children's executive function skills.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A skill only develops while it is the one being used, so the shortcut has to be closed off for a time.
Do this in protected practice time rather than in work that counts, and stop if the child's distress is climbing rather than settling.
When reading results lift across a whole state after every teacher is retrained, the lesson is uncomfortable and hopeful at once. A good part of what looks like children failing is teaching that has not caught up yet.
Clapping games, skipping rhymes and silly verses are worth doing. They are good for the ear and they cost nothing, but they will not on their own repair a reading difficulty, and it is kinder to say so early.
A child who talks well, listens well and seems bright will have their reading failure read as laziness. The strengths are exactly what makes the blame stick.