Reading and the brain

All of our brains are constantly monitoring what is going on around us. Also, monitoring what is happening inside us. Are we hungry, worried, need to visit the bathroom, does the person with whom we are working like us, recurring flashes of an over-heard argument, etc.

So - we all have to work really hard to keep our attention centered upon a task. As adults, we must start early in guiding our children to build sustained and focused attention.

Our working memory is only about one and one-half seconds long. This is actually a lot of brain time. Connections in the brain happen in bits of 1 / 1000 parts of each second. The short bits of working memory string along as connecting loops - as long as we are not interrupted.  An interruption breaks the string of connecting loops.

Interruptions occur when we stop to sound out a word, or we experience an error, or we allow our focus to drift. (An error even creates a noise in the brain.) Quit stopping to sound out; it is counter-productive. Tell your child to slide over unknown words and keep reading. Or you tell him any unknown words.

It is most likely we will not be able to retrieve the bits of information we had stored on the loop before we got interrupted. Short-term memory is a "work space;" it does not "hold" for long.

Surprisingly, much of what we do all day is increasingly automatic as we age. You can see the early stages of this in young children as they gather skills: dress themselves, tie shoes, manage a spoon, then a fork, etc. These skills become automatic with mastery.

Did you know that reading needs to become an automatic activity for your child?

The reason we have so many children in the upper grades failing to do well in school is that they never anchored the critical elements of the early reading task within their minds.  They were never able to get enough mastery to become automatic. The sad thing is that they could have. 

I have created a few books to help your child learn the tricky lessons that make a difference. They also teach a special comprehension method. I use ebay as my website. Search Instant Reading Help all my books will pop up for you.
Teaching smarter is so much fun and lots less stress!!!  Please feel welcome to leave questions or comments. Thank you, Mary Maisner