Visual Tracking Exercises for Reading Problems

Recently a student was reading aloud to me. As he read the material I noticed several reading problems:

· his reading was slow (although not labored)

· he often guessed at words by looking at the word shape or the first couple of letters (wailed for walled)

· he skipped articles (a, an, the)

· he skipped words

· he skipped whole lines

· he wouldn’t read the sentences as punctuated (he would pause mid sentence as if a period were there and then begin in the middle of the sentence as if it were a new sentence)

These issues will make it impossible for the reader to comprehend the story. They’re literally just taking in small bits of information that seem completely unrelated.

He needs to read faster for his fluency exams, but speed has to be put on the back burner while these more important issues are dealt with. What good will it be for him to make the same mistakes reading faster? It will still leave him failing his reading exams.

I follow the 80/20 rule. What one thing can I do that will show the most improvement in these areas? Using my decades of experience I determine to use Visual Tracking Exercises to remediate his reading problems.

Visual tracking exercises are able to correct most, if not all, of his reading problems.

Visual Tracking Exercises:

· improve speed of left to right reading (fluency)

· improve accuracy

· improve attention to detail (the tail of a j going down and to the left, punctuation, spelling)

· improve letter and word automaticity (immediate recognition of a letter or word without having to decode it)

· improve focus and attention

· decrease the occurrence of letter reversals in reading and writing

After introducing visual tracking exercises for ten minutes. I retested the student. He showed improvement with just one session. He improved both his reading speed and accuracy considerably. His reading speed went up by 30 words per minute and his reading accuracy improved.

We’ll continue adding visual tracking exercises before his daily reading exercises until he’s reading in the 90th percentile or above.

Would you like to try this out for yourself? Here’s a link to our Visual Tracking Exercises freebie.

If you love Visual Tracking Exercises, you can order

the Visual Tracking Exercises Workbook here. Just print it out and begin in five minutes! Everything is already done for you.

Let us know how you use Visual Tracking Exercises.