Gamer mom wonders how to get her youngest son to read
My youngest son is 6 and is struggling with 1st grade reading and math. Those two are likely related - he doesn’t read the instructions for the math, and doesn’t recall words that he just wrote. Maybe it’s what his teacher called ‘academic scaffolding.’ If so, he’s likely to just grown right through it, and retention will just come to him.
Waiting isn’t a good approach, however. So instead, Gamermom is schemeing up a way to get her little one engaged in reading. Approach it from his interests…
Last year, over Spring Break, we found an innovative way to use World of Warcraft to teach him letters and letter combinations. He would sit on a computer behind me logged on as one of our characters. I’d sit on my machine and use the in game page function to send him letters and letter combos.
Our chats looked alot like this:
Huncamunca pages: “A”
Huncamunca pages: “a”
Huncamunca pages: “a”
Huncamunca pages: “E”
Huncamunca pages: “e”
Huncamunca pages: “e”
He would call out the letter I paged with all the excitement that only a 5 year old can.
For a week, we worked through all of the letters and beginning letter combos:
Huncamunca pages: “th”
His teacher called me at work the week following Spring Break. “What did you do with George? His progress is remarkable?”
Well, I explained that we played a computer game together and she responded with “Well, whatever you did, do it every night!”
Yes, my son’s teacher encouraged us to play WoW every night. Lots of arm twisting involved there.
We graduated over the summer to spelling out the name of monsters in the game. The quicker he spelled them out, the faster I’d attack. We died many times, but in the end, he got really good at it.
We aren’t playing WoW currently, and we’ve taken that technique as far as it could go. Now I need something new….got any ideas for how to teach your child to read in games? Stay tuned and I’ll let ya know what we come up with.
