That's Good Parenting
Hello and welcome to "That's Good Parenting". The podcast that searches for simple steps to reduce your parenting stress. Sometimes those days of feeling like a "good parent" can feel few and far between.
And like you, I personally have struggled with parenting frustration, exhaustion, and even guilt. But I also know that there are solutions out there that we could put to use today.
My name is Dori Durbin.
It's my mission to search with you to find simple steps and tools to create confident and resilient kids-- without losing ourselves in the process.
You may be wondering who I am. I'm a former teacher, coach and fitness instructor turned children's book author and illustrator, as well as a book and parenting abundance coach.
More importantly, I'm a Christian wife and mom of two amazing young adults who, have quite uniquely put me through the parenting ringer myself. I've been fortunate enough to have interviewed hundreds of experts, parents and authors who have all created parenting tools that have your family's best interest at heart.
So let's stick together to find fast and effective solutions that fit our particular parenting problems. So that we can end war of our days cheering out: Now "That's Good Parenting!"
That's Good Parenting
You Can Close the Reading Gap: Effective Strategies for Parents and Educators with Linda Rumpf EP 105
Listen to this episode, "You Can Close the Reading Gap: Effective Strategies for Parents and Educators with Linda Rumpf" as reading specialist and tutor Linda Rumpf joins host Dori Durbin. Are you worried about your child falling behind in reading? Maybe you're not sure how to help their reading struggles yourself? In this episode, Linda Rumpf shares insights on dyslexia, effective teaching methods, and how parents can take an active role in their child's reading journey. Get tips to enhance your child's reading skills, understand learning differences, and revolutionize your approach to reading education!
This episode covers:
- The prevalence and misconceptions about dyslexia
- The impact of COVID on reading skills and education
- The importance of phonics and cursive writing
- The power of storytelling in education
- Continuous reading technique and its benefits
- How parents can teach reading at home
- The Close the Reading Gap Summit
Listen to hear how you CAN help your child become a confident reader -- and enjoy the process!
About Linda Rumpf: Linda Rumpf is a reading specialist and tutor with years of experience in helping children overcome reading challenges. With a background in Waldorf education and a passion for empowering parents, Linda combines innovative teaching methods with practical strategies to help children and families close the reading gap. Her approach focuses on continuous reading, multi-sensory learning, and tailored instruction to ensure every child can thrive as a reader.
Find Linda Rumpf:
Website: https://myhighimpacttutoring.com
Summit: https://closethereadinggap.com
Did you love this episode? Discover more here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thats-good-parenting/id1667186115
More about Dori Durbin: Dori Durbin is a Christian wife, mom, author, illustrator, and a kids' book coach who after experiencing a life-changing illness, quickly switched gears to follow her dream. She creates kids' books to provide a fun and safe passageway for kids and parents to dig deeper and experience empowered lives. Dori also coaches non-fiction authors, professionals, and aspiring authors to "kid-size" their content into informational and engaging kids' books! Find out more here: https://www.doridurbin.com/
Follow Dori Durbin:
https://www.instagram.com/dori_durbin
https://www.facebook.com/
Intro for TDP (version 2)
[00:00:00] Linda Rumpf: if you don't have your basic skills you start to lose more and more ground as you go up and up.
[00:00:08] Linda Rumpf: Each level, so the gap widens, unfortunately you, you need to be able to have your basic skills to embrace more vocabulary, more content vocabulary as the subjects get a little more difficult. Yeah, the problem just exacerbates
[00:00:26] Dori Durbin: Welcome to That's Good Parenting, the podcast where I search for simple steps to reduce your parenting stress and help you enjoy your parenting years a little bit more. I'm your host, children's book author, illustrator, publisher, and ghost writer, Dori Durbin. I'm dedicated to helping families communicate, connect, and grow more.
[00:00:48] Dori Durbin: Okay parents, so have you ever felt completely overwhelmed to help your child with reading and they're struggling and you're struggling and you're feeling like maybe I'm just not doing this right? But [00:01:00] maybe even worse, maybe there's something going on that you just don't know about. You're probably not alone.
[00:01:05] Dori Durbin: And in today's episode, you might be able to see just how not alone you are. Linda Rump is here and she is the host of the upcoming Close the Reading Gap Summit. She's going to share valuable insights that could actually transform your children's reading journey. So whether you're looking for answers, you're a professional looking for classroom learning.
[00:01:26] Dori Durbin: Help or if you're just curious about what all of this is, you're going to want to stick around. So welcome, Linda. Hi.
[00:01:34] Linda Rumpf: Thank you.
[00:01:36] Dori Durbin: Thank you for being here. And I know you're very humble, but I'm also going to say with your years of experience, how common is it that kids have dyslexia? And maybe what is one of the biggest misconceptions that their parents have about dyslexia before going into the classroom?
[00:01:54] Linda Rumpf: In my summit that goes live on October 18th through 20th, [00:02:00] but you're probably seeing this a little after that, know that it's still available and you can just go to close the reading gap. com and you can still access the summit. I have 22 top experts coming on to talk about exactly this. The experts say now that one in five people, some marker for dyslexia. Now, it might not be severe, it might be light or medium, but that is huge. If you're in a group of five people, one person is likely to have struggled when learning to read. It's much more widespread than we ever thought.
[00:02:49] Dori Durbin: Wow, that's a lot.
[00:02:50] Dori Durbin: And you said there's different levels. I didn't realize that either. Low, medium, and high then?
[00:02:55] Linda Rumpf: Yes, and so some people who might who have [00:03:00] a very good educational experience and teachers who are teaching with phonics and have all the tools in their bag for doing excellent reading teaching and are having children practice and read aloud, which is one of the big keys.
[00:03:18] Linda Rumpf: Those Children who have, light dyslexia, it. It might never have been identified because they were able to remediate that just through good education. But now we know that the school systems are struggling, and part of that was because in 1990, as some of you may know, we stopped Using phonics in the classroom.
[00:03:47] Linda Rumpf: And so then 10 years later, we had all these high schoolers who were doing what they call barking at print. So they were reading a [00:04:00] whole paragraph and they couldn't tell you what it said. And that approach. That this whole educational fad embraced was called whole word reading. So they actually had kids memorizing words instead of learning to sound them out.
[00:04:18] Linda Rumpf: And this went on for a decade. So it left the school system in shambles in terms of teaching reading. And then in 2000, one of the last acts that president Clinton did when he was in office was to mandate that phonics come back into the classroom. But the wording of that law was that teachers could use quote unquote mixed methods.
[00:04:42] Linda Rumpf: So it was wide open. Teachers who had In the previous decade, been through teacher training school and learned this whole word method and hadn't really learned to teach phonics. We're then suddenly challenged with adding some phonics [00:05:00] to their classroom. So they maybe added a block of phonics, but it wasn't complete phonics.
[00:05:05] Linda Rumpf: Wow. And it's so different from the previous, 10 years before.
[00:05:10] Linda Rumpf: Yeah. Yeah. So now big changes are coming down the pike. And so I know that Ohio just mandated that phonics has to come into the classroom and also into the colleges, into the teacher training.
[00:05:25] Linda Rumpf: Programs. I know because I'm back in a master's degree program studying to get even better at what I do. And so I'm in I'm at the University of Cincinnati in a literacy. Master's degree program, and they just revamped the curriculum because the rule came down from, the Ohio government that we have to use what's called a structured literacy curriculum that's going to involve [00:06:00] very systematic phonics teaching.
[00:06:02] Linda Rumpf: So all the professors now have had to switch what they're teaching, and this is just happening now.
[00:06:10] Dori Durbin: And that's probably years of their teaching that they're undoing. So it must be that important, right?
[00:06:16] Linda Rumpf: Yes. Yes. Change takes time in the system, unfortunately. Yeah. So parent for parents at home who are maybe home teaching a child.
[00:06:25] Linda Rumpf: You have almost. Dodged a bullet by not being in the school system. But I know that a lot of parents here watching their children are in the school system, and they may be struggling with this. They may be struggling with a child who's not learning to read and knowing that they're just sitting in this IEP room year after year, and the child is not progressing.
[00:06:52] Linda Rumpf: And there are also going to be big changes. And how the IEP system is. Provided, [00:07:00] so I know because there's this government supported agency called the National Student Support Accelerator and I watched them very closely and their recommendations are based on. Nationwide studies that they're doing right now, where they've placed tutors in public schools all throughout the country, and they're gathering data and gathering data, and they've actually come out with a recommendation that students not be pulled out of their main classrooms.
[00:07:37] Linda Rumpf: Yeah, and this is going to be huge. This is the whole system is going to have to change. Because while they're pulled out to do their. To go to an IEP room, they're missing these lectures of the main content. And so they just get farther and farther behind. And
[00:07:55] Dori Durbin: you said that was a national change?
[00:07:57] Linda Rumpf: The agency is called the National Student Support [00:08:00] Accelerator, and they work with the government to try to figure out, what can we do about the reading issue? Actually two thirds of fourth graders now are reading below grade level. So it's a crisis.
[00:08:16] Dori Durbin: I was going to ask, how do you know where most of them are?
[00:08:19] Dori Durbin: Are they like a year behind, a few years behind? How much of a gap is there?
[00:08:23] Linda Rumpf: What I've noticed in my tutoring practice is that there are two different sort of tracks here. One is the students who were going into like maybe the first or second grade during COVID. And so that's COVID learning loss. So those children tend to be about two years behind.
[00:08:43] Linda Rumpf: And it's just the two years of COVID. That they lost and so a lot of those students are going into 5th, 6th grade now, and they are about 2 years behind grade level. But the problem is that as you go [00:09:00] up and up, it becomes more like 3 years behind grade level. Because if you don't have your basic skills you start to lose more and more ground as you go up and up.
[00:09:12] Linda Rumpf: Each level, so the gap widens, unfortunately you, you need to be able to have your basic skills to embrace more vocabulary, more content vocabulary as the subjects get a little more difficult. Yeah, the problem just exacerbates
[00:09:30] Dori Durbin: If you have dyslexia, for instance, on top of that, it's even a broader, right?
[00:09:35] Dori Durbin: Yeah, that's the 2nd
[00:09:36] Linda Rumpf: track. So some children don't just have COVID learning loss, they have Actual reading issues of some kind. So whether it's been diagnosed as dyslexia or it's undiagnosed these students would have had issues even without COVID. That's the other track and the students can be many grade levels [00:10:00] behind if their reading issue hasn't been caught and remediated.
[00:10:06] Dori Durbin: I have kids in college, so I'm thinking Yeah, it is going to carry all the way through their academic career, really, if it doesn't catch up, and as the studies get harder, that's an even bigger gap to try to bridge, right?
[00:10:19] Linda Rumpf: Yes, I have a college student right now who her reading was never properly remediated, but she did enough to get by.
[00:10:30] Linda Rumpf: And so they kept passing her up the grades, apparently, and then she graduated high school and entered college. And the reading is still on about a 5th grade to 6th grade. When we started, it was about a 5th to 6th grade level. Now she's a lot higher, but trying to read journal articles is a real challenge.
[00:10:50] Dori Durbin: That's super tough. I was thinking even when I wrote my first book and before, it was actually about the time that COVID came in, I was worried about the [00:11:00] text, about the font size, about, easy is this To read for any kid. And then somebody said, Oh, should think about, fonts that are more dyslexia friendly.
[00:11:09] Dori Durbin: I thought, my goodness, I've never even thought about that. As a parent, even choosing books that maybe were more dyslexic friendly without, because when they're little, you don't necessarily know that they have an issue yet.
[00:11:19] Linda Rumpf: Yeah. And larger fonts. are really much, much easier for a child who has reading issues.
[00:11:29] Linda Rumpf: Yeah. I have, a lot of my students are always like, can you make it a little bigger?
[00:11:35] Dori Durbin: Blow the book up. If you could put it on an iPad, and just blow it up. Yeah. I know it's interesting too. And if they don't have the decorative little corners and edges to the font, that makes a difference too, doesn't it?
[00:11:47] Linda Rumpf: It does. And then, the fonts that have the A. That is a little curl on top that often gets read as different other vowels like an E, because if you flipped it [00:12:00] over, it has that curl underneath and yeah, if a dyslexic. Brain will often flip things into the four quadrants.
[00:12:12] Linda Rumpf: And it's interesting because dyslexia we, it's even the word makes it sound like a diss, right? Like it's a negative, but what we now know is that the brain of someone who can flip things into four quadrants is actually has a superpower. And One of the things that comes out when you really start to study the dyslexic brain is that that people just learn differently.
[00:12:44] Linda Rumpf: Okay. And so dyslexics, they are what we call right brain. So they're focusing their brain power basically on the left brain. Part of the brain that is creative [00:13:00] and musical and, lots of things that the majority of the population might not be good at, so they are good speakers. They are good problem solvers.
[00:13:19] Linda Rumpf: And then there's this four quadrant thing. And so they make actually amazing computer programmers because it's four quadrant geometry that you have to use for computer programming. And so we're now viewing dyslexia as not a curse, but that these children are what they call twice exceptional.
[00:13:42] Linda Rumpf: They're. They have a gift. And unfortunately, the way we teach in school doesn't always support that. So a dyslexic child can think I'm stupid or, I I'm a bad student, and it's just not the case. [00:14:00] And so with what we have learned, we can actually support and celebrate the way that person's brain works differently and the gifts that they have.
[00:14:12] Dori Durbin: That's a really great way to look at it. And it's interesting, the four quarter, when you started to talk about the quadrants, I was thinking, okay, so cursive has to be ridiculously hard to, like true cursive, like we used to use a long time ago.
[00:14:25] Linda Rumpf: Actually, my dyslexic students are almost perfect at cursive from the get go.
[00:14:31] Linda Rumpf: And it is, it's very interesting, Dory, because it's cursive handwriting is something that we teach on purpose to anyone who has, is struggling with reading or letter reversals or anything like that, because it's very corrective for letter reversals. After you Write enough things in cursive, the brain starts to connect things and the [00:15:00] dyslexic has much less letter reversal.
[00:15:03] Linda Rumpf: And it's also creative, it flows and it also involves the hand. And so the multisensory piece is very important for dyslexics because they're often in different senses. And very kinesthetic. Cursive is just wonderful for anyone who has, is struggling with reading.
[00:15:28] Dori Durbin: That's really cool.
[00:15:29] Dori Durbin: And I can see, now that you explained it, I can see how that would work. But in my brain, I was thinking, boy, that's going to be tough. But you're following the letter making when you're reading it. and connecting with that in your brain too.
[00:15:41] Linda Rumpf: Yeah. And it's interesting because studies show that printing and typing activities fire totally other parts of the brain than cursive handwriting.
[00:15:51] Dori Durbin: Huh. That's really fascinating.
[00:15:53] Linda Rumpf: Yeah, I
[00:15:55] Dori Durbin: think you just blew my mind. Actually,
[00:15:58] Linda Rumpf: that's really the state of [00:16:00] California just mandated that cursive be taught again in the schools.
[00:16:04] Dori Durbin: Oh, see, I feel like cursive dropped out. I remember my kids, my oldest. writing in cursive, my youngest doing it for like maybe a year and then never seeing it again.
[00:16:16] Dori Durbin: So yeah that's great. And that makes me happy actually.
[00:16:19] Linda Rumpf: I know. And a lot of us have wondered over the years, how will a person even write, sign their name? But there are so many more benefits that we're just finding out about, just the flow and the connectedness and, and I also, because I'm a trained Waldorf teacher, so I know about the process of making the the eternity sign. Where it's like a loop and then coming down and then a loop. There's something about that form in Waldorf education. We we. do form drawing, okay? And there are [00:17:00] certain forms that correspond to processes in the body.
[00:17:05] Linda Rumpf: And one of them is this eternity sign. It's, it mirrors the way things flow in the body, in and out of organs. And you make those movements over and over in cursive writing. So there's something really organic about it that like the body understands.
[00:17:28] Dori Durbin: That's really neat. Can you tell our audience what Waldorf teaching is and what you mean by that?
[00:17:34] Linda Rumpf: So Waldorf education is basically teaching through the arts. So it's a very multi sensory, So we might teach math through walking the times tables in a circle. And so in the younger grades, so we might have the children saying one, two, and [00:18:00] clapping three, four, five, six. seven, eight. So you're hearing the two, four, six, eight on the accents.
[00:18:09] Linda Rumpf: We have beanbags. We might toss the beanbag up and catch it on three, four, five, and toss it six, four, seven, eight, toss it nine. So then you're getting the threes times tables, but you are receiving it in the body. And so that's just one part of Waldorf education is the multisensory. We might paint and draw.
[00:18:32] Linda Rumpf: a story when we're teaching children to read. And so it might be the story of the three bears. And so we tell the story and then the children are drawing the picture. But the teacher is also making on the board a bear and making the bear with one hump for the muzzle and then a bigger hump for the big belly.
[00:18:54] Linda Rumpf: And you can see that form is a buh. But the children don't know it yet. They're just [00:19:00] copying how the teacher's drawing this bear. And then the porridge is on the table. And so I'm making the table like this with a, a cross. And then underneath part like a cafe table. And then I'm drawing all the porridge on top.
[00:19:16] Linda Rumpf: And then we're decorating and everything like that. That's day one. Then day two, we come back to the story. And then we're just doing the b bear. And At the table, and then the children are hearing me make the sounds and then day three, I'm showing them, but we could just use the symbol to table. Right?
[00:19:38] Linda Rumpf: So then for the 1st time, I drop the T. And the light is just on because they've taken in through their imagination the story and they lived with the characters and it stays in the memory when you [00:20:00] take this visual and imaginative approach for young children, because young children live in the imagination and in pictures.
[00:20:08] Linda Rumpf: If you start right in with symbols, then they can get, it's very abstract. So for the young child, and especially for learning in grades one through three, we tie everything into story. Because they just, they're little sponges for stories. We all are. That's why we're all addicted to screens and TV and movies, right?
[00:20:32] Linda Rumpf: The human brain thinks in terms of story. And so Waldorf is all about, it's all about that.
[00:20:40] Dori Durbin: Oh, I love that. You're speaking to the choir right here. You realize that, right? Like stories are amazing. Yes.
[00:20:46] Linda Rumpf: You're a writer and I'm a writer too. And yeah, did you ever read that little book by Clarissa Pincola Estes?
[00:20:54] Linda Rumpf: The Power of Story, I think it's called, or it's a little book. It's actually [00:21:00] physically little, like this little tiny book when you see it on the shelf in the library, it's all cute. And In it, she talks about she tells actually a story and it's a story that comes out of her family history of two people who escaped from the Nazi prison camps and they are naked and it's the middle of the winter, it's snowing outside and they both, and they meet in this barn, they've both escaped and they meet up in this barn and the.
[00:21:34] Linda Rumpf: The soldiers with the dogs are, they can hear them outside and they know that they're probably going to get caught and they don't even know how they're going to make it through the night because it's so cold. And so they tell each other stories. And they make it through the night on the stories.
[00:21:53] Linda Rumpf: They don't give up and then they go on and there and they get away. [00:22:00] So it's this little book about the power of story to uplift our souls and give us the hope we need to keep going. And I love that book because, stories are everything to us. Yeah they just give us. They give us so much inspiration and they give us what we need.
[00:22:23] Dori Durbin: Which is exactly why you're in what you're doing to help kids be able to appreciate that and to be able to read freely. And
[00:22:30] Linda Rumpf: yeah. Yes. And there's so much more than just reading the words on the page. And that's a big part of what I do in my tutoring is choosing books for kids. I feel like it's an art form.
[00:22:45] Linda Rumpf: I feel like it's really important. I think very deeply about each child. What would spark their interest? What would spark grass ring? Okay. The golden ticket, which is actual love of [00:23:00] reading. Because if we're really excited to get to the next part, and this is really the moment that every reading teacher or reading tutor waits for is when you go to That lesson.
[00:23:15] Linda Rumpf: And the student says, I read ahead. Yes. Yeah, they picked up the book themselves. They wanted to know what was going to happen next. And so engaging them in a love of reading is my, it's my highest ideal.
[00:23:33] Dori Durbin: Now, does your, I know you have a method. It's called continuous reading. Does your continuous reading technique feed into this somehow?
[00:23:43] Linda Rumpf: Yes okay a lot of the of society knows now that it's very good to read to a young child. To cuddle up in bed or on the couch and read picture books to your emerging reader. [00:24:00] Okay, is, we all know that promotes literacy. But what? A lot of people don't know as much is that it is very important for the child to read to you.
[00:24:14] Linda Rumpf: And so we used to have this thing that we did in classrooms called round robin reading. Do you remember it?
[00:24:21] Dori Durbin: It's your turn. You look for the paragraph you knew so you could read that, right?
[00:24:24] Linda Rumpf: Yeah. Okay, so this was when children, when the teacher sat at the desk and the children took turns reading a paragraph.
[00:24:34] Linda Rumpf: And we don't do this anymore in school, and so we have a kinder, gentler school system now than the stand and deliver old time, from 100 years ago, when you had to recite in front of the classroom. Now we don't want to, Emotionally damaged kids who can't read by making them read in front of people.
[00:24:55] Linda Rumpf: But what's happened is that children don't have a lot of [00:25:00] opportunity to read out loud. And so when you read out loud, you gain what we call phonological awareness. So you hear yourself read and you hear your mistake. Because we've all learned to speak, okay? And we all have all that vocabulary in our ear already.
[00:25:22] Linda Rumpf: So when we read out loud off the page, we know right away if it sounds like a word or not. Okay? If we read something and it doesn't sound like a word, we're sensitive to that. So we'll go back and we'll look at that word again. Okay? And we'll try maybe a different way of sounding it out. And that's really important.
[00:25:46] Linda Rumpf: So the self correcting happens when we read aloud, when we hear ourselves. So continuous reading is when we read for extended periods of time aloud to a skilled [00:26:00] listener. Okay, so what does go on a lot in classrooms now is what they call guided reading. So it's these little when they have the children pair up, or go in little groups of two or three and read to each other.
[00:26:15] Linda Rumpf: And that's not as good because you don't have an adult there who can correct and who is like writing down all the miscues and noticing the patterns and noticing what the children need. The child needs to learn if you're reading this to appear and you're in the second grade, they're not going to correct.
[00:26:37] Linda Rumpf: They, they might not know. So it's better than nothing, but it's not really probably jumping kids up quite a bit in being able to. Correct miscues. So when you read to a skilled listener, which can be a parent, because skilled just means you can read, [00:27:00] right? Okay, then the parent lets the child read.
[00:27:06] Linda Rumpf: Continuously tries not to interrupt. If the child does ask for help, you can give help. Okay, but we're basically like trying to let them get in a flow of reading and then we're writing down any miscues so we're noting if there are any patterns and we might notice something like, okay, every time they come to a word that has a silent E ending, they're not making that vowel long, the previous vowel long, how the, Silent E makes the previous vowel go long, like in the word name.
[00:27:44] Linda Rumpf: Okay, so if they're saying nam every single time, then you're thinking, Oh, okay. Here's a pattern we can work on and then I just have parents Google up a list right there on their phone of [00:28:00] silent e words and then Make a list in front of the child and then as they go through Help them say each one with the long vowel after about 10 or 15 are some of those, the child is going to pick up the pattern.
[00:28:17] Linda Rumpf: So it ain't rocket science. Reading interventionists do have quite a bit of training. And we know things like the scope and sequence of the best way, the best You know processes and order to teach things in, and you can't, you might not know that all overnight as a parent, but there are these little things that you can do that are so powerful.
[00:28:41] Dori Durbin: And I remember reading, I think it was somewhere on your website that you feel like anybody who can read can teach another person to read. Yeah. I think there are a lot of people that feel like they, they don't know enough. Yeah. And they're going to mess their kids up, or they're going to mess someone up by not doing it, but what you're saying is it's not that hard.
[00:28:57] Dori Durbin: It's something that we can help with. [00:29:00]
[00:29:00] Linda Rumpf: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Especially with the emergent reader.
[00:29:05] Dori Durbin: Yeah.
[00:29:06] Linda Rumpf: Yeah. Or that reader who might be just behind because of COVID learning loss, I recommend that parents. Just start and get books that are 90 percent readable by your student. Okay, so you want about 10%, 5 to 10 percent of words on a page that they don't know.
[00:29:34] Linda Rumpf: So books that are going to be fairly easy and confidence building for the child, but still have a few words that they don't know. And then that's what we call the instructional level. Okay, if you have a child in a book where there are, half the words they don't know, that's, that will be what we call a frustrational level and the brain doesn't learn as well that way, especially if the child has undiagnosed [00:30:00] reading issues or dyslexia, but if you find this sweet spot of the instructional level for the books that you put in front of the child, what will happen is the brain We'll start to be able to take in that amount of information, we'll take it in, we'll learn it, and then all of a sudden you'll be up to the next level, and you'll be up to the next level, and you'll be up to the next level, and it's really fast if you go incrementally like that.
[00:30:31] Dori Durbin: That's interesting. So I know that there are programs that help you pick books. Is that typically what you try to do is encourage them to use the programs that will progress?
[00:30:41] Linda Rumpf: There are like the readers in the library, but a lot of times they're not really incremented that way. Okay. A lot of the readers, they say they're at a certain level because they have a certain number of words on a page and a certain [00:31:00] number of pages in a book.
[00:31:01] Linda Rumpf: It's really. It's not how a reading interventionist really separates for that, Lexile level does not necessarily mean, go the same way with instructional level. So what you have to do is you just have to experiment. Okay. So you might if your child is in the first grade, and you might want to just go for some of the reader ones.
[00:31:30] Linda Rumpf: And just see how, how many words are they missing on a page? And if they're, if it's too easy, just bump up. If it's too hard, try to go maybe more for a picture book where you've got less words on a page. And yeah, you have to hit that sweet spot. It's more important than going with a grade level.
[00:31:58] Dori Durbin: Interesting. Interesting. [00:32:00] Now I know you're probably going to say this is probably true, but if they want more information, I'm assuming That they should go to your Close the Reading Gap Summit coming up?
[00:32:08] Linda Rumpf: Yes! We have these 22 top experts. Some of them are like professors, emeritus top of the top in the teaching of reading to children with dyslexia.
[00:32:20] Linda Rumpf: We have some behavior specialists. for side issues that might arise when trying to deal with this twice exceptional child who has this particular personality and learning style in the home. And we've got certified academic language therapists, And what are called, yeah, the level of professionalism represented is amazing and they are going to give recommendations and actual instructions for how to put together a reading program for a child in the [00:33:00] home.
[00:33:00] Linda Rumpf: Even if your child goes to school, if your child, if you feel your child is falling through the cracks, you can do something about it. You don't have to go through years and years of advocating for them to get what they need at school. If you're sensing that the school system is not going to change that quickly, you I really want to support parents to take this up themselves.
[00:33:24] Linda Rumpf: And one of the neatest things that came out in one of the talks in the summit was that, these pillars of putting together a structured literacy program that, parents look for a curriculum, they look for a preset curriculum out there that they can buy, and use for their parents.
[00:33:46] Linda Rumpf: For their children, but what one of the experts brought forth was that there are these different pillars, these different parts of a reading program, but you can even make them up [00:34:00] yourself, the first one is that the program have a scope and a sequence. Okay, and so that might be mind boggling but I'm not trained, I don't know the scope, like everything they need to learn, and I don't know the sequence, like what order.
[00:34:17] Linda Rumpf: Okay, but you can make it really simple for yourself. You can think of the vowels. You can start with A. And you can start with all the vowels, A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y, right? Make sure that they know the sounds for each of those. And then you can start with A. And you can have all the letter, all the vowel combinations that go with A.
[00:34:41] Linda Rumpf: Like A, I, right? And A, U. And you can, some of this is just really common sense. Thanks. And if you know how to read, then you can create a scope and sequence [00:35:00] and different programs have different scopes and sequences. But then if you have your list, also in the summit, we're going to give a scope and sequence that parents can use and it's going to be a free download for one of our experts and there's a whole video with it about how to do that.
[00:35:21] Linda Rumpf: And. If you have that, then you can use the continuous reading method that I use where the child is reading to you aloud for an extended period of time, 20 30 minutes a night, and then you can be checking off your list. Anything that comes up in the reading, you go ahead and teach that now because it just came up.
[00:35:45] Linda Rumpf: It's fresh, right? But then you'll also know the things that you still need to cover. So the scope and sequence is one thing. And then another thing is multisensory. And you can find things that you can do with your [00:36:00] body. Like one of one of the recommendations was take walks. And when you're on nature walks or walks around the neighborhood with your children and how you pick things up, you're like, Oh, there's a leaf.
[00:36:11] Linda Rumpf: There's a stick. Try to find things that start with like the letter E that start with E or try to find things that start with B. Just simple things that you can do that promotes so much learning because the child is moving their body and getting their body involved.
[00:36:31] Dori Durbin: That's awesome.
[00:36:32] Dori Durbin: That is awesome. I know that we could probably keep going, but I am going to make you tell them where the summit is and how they can get it, how much it costs. So make sure we do that first.
[00:36:43] Linda Rumpf: Okay, so it's closedthereadinggap. com. It's free. There is a VIP ticket available for I think like 47 where you can get the recordings.
[00:36:57] Linda Rumpf: And so then you get more [00:37:00] time, the summit will be over a three day period and there are 22 experts on there with all these tips and tricks and recommendations for how to teach your child at home, how to teach a dyslexic child to read at home. It is very specific to Everything you need to know.
[00:37:20] Linda Rumpf: So there is a lot of content. And you might want to go for that VIP ticket so that you have enough time to go back for all the information, but it is but the summit is free to the public. And so we have
[00:37:39] Dori Durbin: your website and if they want to contact you.
[00:37:43] Linda Rumpf: Okay, my website is my high impact tutoring.
[00:37:49] Linda Rumpf: And so you can contact me through the website. I do give free reading assessments. So if you're, if you want to figure out what [00:38:00] level your child is at help. It's a really big help for choosing books and getting that instructional level. I can help you figure that out and we can talk about. How long it might take your child to catch up to grade level with tutoring with me.
[00:38:18] Linda Rumpf: But I also have been really transforming my tutoring into including a program where I train the parents to take over the tutoring. So I do things a little differently. So if you sign on with me, you're not signing on. You're not signing your life away that you're, this is going to take two years of monthly payments or something like that.
[00:38:46] Linda Rumpf: I really believe that parents can take up this work in the home. And I actually believe that if we can foster a home reading, Reading aloud [00:39:00] revolution, where all parents are doing this in the home with their children, having the child read aloud to them every night that we can beat this literacy crisis completely in the country.
[00:39:12] Linda Rumpf: So I'm very I'm very committed to helping you, the parent, learn what you need to learn. To take over teaching your child.
[00:39:23] Dori Durbin: Awesome. That is awesome. I think you've done a few different things for our parents today. Reignited the love for reading and what you get out of books.
[00:39:31] Dori Durbin: You've talked about the fact that they can actually teach their kids themselves and with very little instruction or help for the most part, and they can sign up for your conference that's coming up. And if they don't do it, they it's a shame because it's free. Yeah. So any last words of advice for our parents out there who are struggling with reading when they're kids?
[00:39:52] Linda Rumpf: I just want to share one last thing about a little boy [00:40:00] who came to me for tutoring, and he was two years behind. It was COVID learning loss, and he was going into the fourth grade, reading at a second grade level, and he was able to catch up a whole grade level in six weeks.
[00:40:13] Dori Durbin: Wow.
[00:40:14] Linda Rumpf: And usually it takes me three months.
[00:40:17] Linda Rumpf: To catch a child up a grade level in reading, even a dyslexic child might take four if they're severely dyslexic, but we can definitely do two grade levels in a school year, which I consider fast, but this child did it in six weeks. And when I asked the mother, sure enough, was having him sit down every night at the kitchen table when she was feeding the baby or making dinner and just read aloud to her.
[00:40:43] Linda Rumpf: From his. school book and she couldn't even speak English. She was from South America. She wasn't, so she wasn't helping him decode. She wasn't doing all these fun extra things like following the patterns and she couldn't [00:41:00] help him with the vocabulary, nothing. It was just the reading aloud. So I just want to highlight that with music, with a sport, with anything we know 30 minutes a day, it's going to lead to mastery and reading is no different.
[00:41:13] Dori Durbin: awesome. What great advice and inspiration, Linda. Thank you so much for your time
[00:41:18] Linda Rumpf: today. You're so welcome and thank you for having me on, Dory. I really enjoyed it.
