Following the words with her finger!!

[tigerfrog]

My DD year two is doing well at school, pretty average work wise, very arty and creative, and very happy. I have one concern with her reading. She decodes well, has a good understanding of what she has read and can discuss the text. She cant read though unless she follows the text with her finger. She loses her place, reads the wrong word, misses out words etc She needs constant reminders to follow it with her finger so that she can read it.
Is this common for this age? I did have her eyes checked last weekend at the opticians and she was fine. Is there anything else I could do to help her?
Thanks for any advice.

There's nothing intrinsically 'wrong' about finger tracking, just a perception that it's babyish and that children shouldn't be doing it once they are past the initial stages of learning to read; I wouldn't worry too much it. However, I would be suspecting poorly developed eye tracking muscles in a child who read as you describe. Consistent left to right tracking is not a 'natural' skill and the eye muscles have to be trained and strengthened to achieve it.

I would initially suspect the method by which she has been taught to read. You say that she can decode well, but was she taught 'other strategies' along with the decoding, such as looking at pictures to get 'clues' for what a word might be, or looking for 'words within words' (or even, horror of horrors, taught to look at the first letter, the last letter and then the one/s in the middle of the word...)? Strategies like these can hamper the development of L to R tracking; the child is looking all over the place and the tracking muscles aren't fully developed. She would need to keep her finger under a word so that she can keep her place when looking elsewhere for clues...

If this is not the case it could be that she needs to be seen by a behavioural optometrist who should be able to pinpoint the problem and give her exercises to improve it.

I work with much older children, but if they were reading as you describe I would be encouraging them to track under words with a finger, pen, lolly stick or anything which would keep them consistently reading from L to R.

(Of course, some-one might well come up with a reply to the effect that it is caused by something I've never thought of or encountered )

I'd agree with Maizie :) that her eye tracking skills don't seem to be very good, and that an optician doesn't test eye tracking - only a behavioural optometrist.

The simplest exercise to improve eye tracking is to get her to read the first word than last word of every line of a page of text. Do that every night for a while.

Also you can stand behind her in the dark and shine a torch on the wall in a figure 8 and get her to follow the light with her eyes.

Swingball is also excellent to develop eye tracking :)

I think finger tracking is useful - I tell the Y4 group I read with once a week to follow with their fingers or bookmarks (when other children are reading).

Here's some more eye tracking advice, from a different site:

The Solution To Eyetracking Difficulties

Most of us don't need to perform like top flight sportsmen, but we do need a cerebellum functioning reasonably well. And that is easy to achieve by exercising it.

So, if your child displays the symptoms of this problem there are three things to do.

First, check that your child is getting the right vitamins, minerals and oils. I do not take supplements as a general habit, but we regularly give our children Omega 3 and Omega 6 oils. You can see an almost instant impact if there is a deficiency there.

Finally, get your child to do a simple exercise to work the cerebellum

Sit on a chair, keep your head still put your arm out in front of you holding a pencil vertically. Then move your hand 18" left to right and back again in front of you while following the pencil steadily with just your eyes.
We have found that the key is to do the exercise for just 20 seconds in each session, but 5-10 times a day. If you are not working the neurons regularly it will be very hard to see any improvement, but it will be life-changing if this is a problem for your child and you manage to do this exercise regularly for a week or two.

This game might also help......

Thanks for all the great advice. She was taught initially in an international school which was still very much focused on whole word reading using picture clues, so that does perhaps explain some of the problem. We are now in a different international school which is much more phonics based, where her reading has improved significantly.
I shall try some of your suggested games and see if there's an improvement. I think i might be struggling to find a behaviour optician here so that might have to wait until a visit to the UK

I don't know where in the world you are, but in the US behaviour optometrists are called developmental optometrist.

Encourage her to put one finger at the start of a line and another finger at the other end. In my experience, this can help substantially.

My DS used to get told off by his teacher for not using his finger.

I'm 42 and when I read the lesson in church I follow the lines with my finger.... (wouldn't want to get lost in front of a couple of hundred people, you see.)

I teach university students in my spare time and, when a new course is being developed, I have to read the material very quickly. For that purpose I use a pencil (or better still a chopstick as it doesn't mark the page and it doesn't threaten to stab me!) to keep my eyes on track. That way, I can read very fast indeed with no loss of meaning.