Reading Club

What difficulties might children encounter while reading?

Learning to read is not an easy task for every child. Many children face serious challenges in this area, despite their efforts.

Reading and comprehension rely on the interplay of several skills. First, it is important that the eye muscles function properly, enabling quick, precise, and controlled eye movements. In addition, children need to easily convert the letters they read into spoken sounds. This requires the ability to connect visual and auditory information and assign meaning to it. A strong vocabulary also supports the reading process. Just think how much faster and easier it is to read a text written in our native language. Children with a limited vocabulary face similar challenges. How can they interpret texts filled with unfamiliar words? Complex expressions or idiomatic phrases present further difficulties. What may seem obvious to adults — like the saying "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" — can confuse a child with reading difficulties, as they might interpret it literally.

The ability to perceive sequences correctly (seriality) ensures that syllables and letters don't get mixed up during reading, as the correct order of letters is crucial in both reading and writing. Analytical-synthetic skills help children recognize suffixes as part of the word, allowing them to understand its proper meaning.

Attention plays a key role in reading, helping children focus on the essential parts of the text, while working memory allows them to retain what they have read. Last but not least, reading motivation is also crucial. If we can awaken their internal motivation, there is a good chance they will develop a passion for reading and eventually become "true readers." After all, a person who reads is a person who thinks.

Our Reading Club supports children precisely in overcoming these difficulties! We develop the skills mentioned above, enabling them to read confidently and expressively, both silently and aloud, while fully understanding the content of the text!

We teach students strategies for text interpretation, helping them appreciate the tools used by authors, and recognize the creative intent that comes from the type and form of the text. They will learn to infer the linguistic subtleties embedded in the text, understand the techniques of persuasion and influence, and become capable of connecting information found in the text with data from other sources.

How do we develop reading comprehension skills at Skillful Friends? 

The development of reading comprehension is a didactic task that expands concentrically, taking into account age-related characteristics, especially the development of thinking forms when designing the tasks. In the developmental process, we planned the topics of the texts to progress from concrete, objective texts towards more abstract, subjective ones. Following the principle of gradual progression, in teaching the levels of reading comprehension, we move from information retrieval towards comparing texts.

The aim of developing, consciously teaching, and assessing reading comprehension skills is not only for students to achieve good grades in school but also to prepare them for the challenges of the information society and lifelong learning.

National assessments prove that a large percentage of children do not understand the texts they read. Determining the internal coherence and essential content of the text, as well as drawing conclusions from the text, pose significant problems for them. Therefore, the primary focus should not be on expanding lexical knowledge but on acquiring skills to find the necessary information. The knowledge to be acquired is primarily manifested in linguistic, textual, or visual expressions. Adequate reading abilities and reading comprehension are necessary for finding and processing information. These are the skills we practice in the Skillful Friends Reading Club. 

Proper paced reading comprehension is necessary regardless of whether the reader obtains information from printed materials or text appearing on a computer screen. Students increasingly choose digital devices and naturally use the new technological tools. Adequate reading skills are not only indispensable for independent knowledge acquisition but also provide a path to appreciating literary works, contributing to value transmission, personal development, enriching emotional life, and, of course, playing a significant role in entertainment.

In the lower grades, the preparation for independent reading begins (process reading) through questioning about the text, discussing the readings, summarizing, and solving written assignments. Additionally, there is an emphasis on sharing reading experiences with peers, comparing readings on similar topics, summarizing and expanding stories, and creating endings for stories. For some children, reading aloud exacerbates the problem as skipping letters, inserting additional letters, swapping sounds, and reversing syllables make comprehension difficult. In such cases, they resort to guessing, resulting in a change or loss of meaning in the text. Difficulties in spatial and temporal orientation, confusion in sequencing, misinterpretation of cause-and-effect relationships or suffixes further hinder comprehension.

There are children who better understand the text when reading silently, as reading aloud or speaking in front of peers may cause anxiety. At Skillful Friends, we place great emphasis on creating an accepting atmosphere, establishing a supportive environment where it is okay to make mistakes in front of educators and peers. Based on feedback from parents, our students approach school obstacles with more confidence and use their language skills more boldly in traditional classroom settings.

Expanding vocabulary is a constant task during our sessions (using categorization of main concepts, forming compound words, word collections, synthesis exercises, etc.). We practice in-depth analysis of texts (word explanations, questioning by paragraph, underlining key points, teaching note-taking, summarizing, etc.). Our focus is not only on understanding written texts but also on developing listening comprehension and text composition skills.

     Reading Club 

If the above time is not suitable for your child, you can inquire about additional options by phone or email.