Micro Reading Interventions
As children learn to read, little barriers can make progress very slow. As a result, they can drop behind, even though they have done all the right things.
If you remove the barrier, they can often surge forward with their reading.
The micro reading intervention approach is to do an an analysis for any barriers for a child and then bring very targeted support, to allow them to achieve much faster progress.
The Patterns to Look For
These barriers present as patterns in the child’s reading. Once you become familiar with those patterns, then the intervention required becomes easy to determine.
Here are the nine patterns to look for, with a brief explanation of each and a summary of the micro intervention needed:
This is caused by a strong pattern analysis ability in the retina of the child’s eyes. That makes a black on white contrast too strong, leading to a shimmering effect.
Micro intervention: Place a tinted plastic sheet over the page.
Impact: Instant
This is caused by a weakness in the convergence and tracking of the eyes together. As a result, the visual cortex receives two images that are slightly misaligned.
Micro intervention: Make the text larger, use a black pen to point at each word in turn and begin to do eye tracking exercises multiple times per day.
Impact: Instant
Even after years of good phonics instruction, some children will find the basic processes of phonics very hard. They will struggle to identify the round phoneme (sound) for each grapheme (letter grouping). They might also struggle to blend sounds into words.
Micro intervention: Use trainertext to scaffold the decoding and begin a phrase reread routine to build subconscious fluency. If blending is a challenge, get the child to break words into sounds and then blend those sounds back into the word.
Impact: 1 year of reading age gain per month of intervention
These tend to be very bright visual learners. They are using the strong visual memory to read whole words by sight, rather than decoding letter patterns into sounds and blending the sounds. We call this pattern “optilexia”.
They usually get the long words right because the context is often quite strong, but the short words (like ‘these’, ‘those’, ‘their’, ‘then’ and ‘them’) all look very similar visually and are often interchangeable in the context.
Micro intervention: Use trainertext and a strong focus on 100% accuracy.
Impact: 3-6 weeks for total catchup.
This child can read short words, but a delay in the development of their short term memory makes working out long words much harder for them.
Micro intervention: Lots of reading with short words, with a phrase reread routine.
Impact: 3-9 months for catch-up to the normal range.
These students seem to be reading fluently, but when they read silently, their comprehension is very low. The reason is that they are not vocalising the text in their head as they read and so their speech comprehension cortex is not engaged.
Micro Intervention: Coach the child to vocalise the words in their head as they read them.
Impact: 2-4 weeks for total catch-up.
These students can read words accurately, but cannot read sentences with fluency and intonation. It is more like listening to a machine gun.
Micro Intervention: Get them to reread each phrase until it can be read fluently, before moving on to the next phrase.
Impact: 2-4 weeks for total catch-up.
These students are struggling with some attention deficit, making getting the reading session done each ay a problem.
Micro Intervention: Use fun games to build their decoding ability until the content of their reading materials is able to hold their attention.
Impact: 3-6 months for catch-up to the normal range.
These students have good word decoding skills, but the parent reports a collapse of the reading session, making more practice impossible. They might go silent or have a tantrum. This is caused by rising stress levels that trigger a fight/flight/freeze stress response.
Micro Intervention: Keep stress levels low with constant praise (every 4-6 seconds) and use trainertext to scaffold success.
Impact: Instant.
Save Time with Expert Support
Often a child will be presenting 3-4 of these patterns. That makes the analysis and development of an intervention plan more complicated.
Therefore, we recommend testing out our expert tutoring, to support the whole process as you build experience.
That way you will save time and frustration, at a practical cost: