New testing aims to catch kids 'faking' their reading skills and actually get help
CBC
In kindergarten, Finley Hodge wasn't ready to read. He didn't learn in Grade 1, either. But this was before mandatory screening, so no one caught the problem.
By Grade 2, his teacher was complaining about rambunctious behaviour in class. But the teacher missed the point.
"He was faking a lot of it and pretending he could read," said his mother, Andrée Hodge.
"They (used to) let these children struggle till the end of third grade, and then say, 'OK, now we'll do something.' It's disastrous for those children.… It's the wait to fail, right?"
Finley's experience is one reason why Hodge and many literacy experts are celebrating a major new push to catch every child who struggles with reading in Calgary.
Over the last four years, the Calgary Board of Education (CBE) retrained 1,000 teachers to implement systematic screening in every single kindergarten classroom, at the beginning and end of the school term. This year, they'll screen all Grade 1 to Grade 3 children at the start of the year as well, ahead of new requirements coming in under the Alberta curriculum.
The tests are designed to break down the skill of reading and pre-reading into several component parts and home in on exactly where each child struggles. Then teachers can catch those falling behind before they get lost.
It represents a new approach to reading education that experts hope will spare hundreds of children the misery of failure.
Finley, who graduated from high school last year, recalls his reading difficulties.
"My first memory of struggling … I remember being (sent to) the halls quite a bit, watching the class from the hall," said Finley. "I'm really happy that they're doing this."
In Finley's case, he was eventually diagnosed with dyslexia. He struggled to catch up to his peers, but with hard work, he graduated. He started machine technologies at SAIT last week.
His mother went on to co-found Decoding Dyslexia Alberta to help her and other parents find more help for their children.
Melody Pelling is the CBE's education director for early literacy. She said these tests in school aren't stressful. The children often don't even know they're being tested because in kindergarten, especially, pre-reading tests can be incorporated in classroom play.
At its most formal, a teacher might sit down one-on-one with a child.
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