What Baseball, A Terrific Dad, and a Bucket Can Teach Us About Reading Success
A Real Life Example of How Essential Fundamental Skills are Important to Success and How Direct Instruction in Details Can Help a Child Achieve Success
My son was playing on the local little league team. He was a good athlete, energetic, enthusiastic and absolutely loved baseball. He could throw, catch and play any position including pitcher. However, he was having difficulties hitting the ball. No matter how hard he tried and how solid he swung the bat he somehow just missed the ball. He was repeatedly striking out. Needless to say, he was getting discouraged and beginning to think he was a ‘poor hitter’.
Fortunately, that was not the end of the story. My son is blessed to have a terrific dad who also happened understand baseball skills. His dad watched him strike out at bat and noticed that when he went to swing the bat at the ball he was stepping back with his foot, this caused his shoulder to drop and the bat to swing under the ball. I had been watching our son and never noticed these important elements of proficient batting. (I just kept saying “You are doing great! Don’t worry, you’ll get it next time.”) His Dad however, saw that he was making errors in an important fundamental element of the correct baseball bat swing.
“Direct targeted instruction in details is not just for baseball, it also helps children achieve READING SUCCESS!“
So that afternoon, he took our son out in the backyard and did some direct instruction on his swing. He simply put an old plastic bucket behind our son’s foot and then started pitching to him. When our son incorrectly stepped back with his foot, he would kick the bucket over. This simple backyard ‘bucket trick’ taught him how to swing without stepping back. Repeated practice of swinging at the ball without stepping back quickly developed ‘proficient’ batting technique. And guess what? The next game our son slammed several solid hits. He was a good hitter the rest of the season including hitting a triple in one of his tournament games. Success because of a great Dad and some specific direct instruction!
The point of this story has nothing to do with baseball.
How a Baseball Story Relates to Reading Success
This story reveals some important lessons applicable to helping children achieve reading success:
- Children with lots of ability and potential can still fail if they are missing essential skills.
- Complex learned skills (such as reading) depend on mastering a series of essential basic skills and techniques. Incorrect approach or gaps in one of these fundamental elements can lead to overall failure.
- Often, we do not even recognize exactly what the child is doing wrong to cause an overall problem. My son did not realize he was stepping back and I certainly never recognized the specific problem. It took someone who knew the specific elements for proficient/correct batting to pinpoint WHY my son was striking out. With reading, the science gives us the specific information on what children who struggle with reading are ‘doing incorrectly’. They are not processing print phonologically. We also need to look carefully at all the essential subskills necessary for reading success.
- The specific teaching or remediation methods DO have significant impact on success. If I were to just have had my son swing the bat more often, do pushups to strengthen his arm, swing faster, or encouraged him to ‘Just keep your eye on the ball’ his batting still would not have improved. He needed specific instruction targeted to the skill gap to actually help him develop the correct batting technique. This correctly targeted instruction is also essential for reading success.
- When children fail, they do begin to feel discouraged and that negativity begins to adversely affect the child. No matter how many times you tell them ‘You’re doing fine’ they know they are “striking out”, they see others succeed and think it’s me. They begin to believe “I’m a poor hitter”, “I just can’t read”, “I’m just stupid”. In addition, when children are ‘not good’ at something they tend to avoid the activity. This is human nature. No one wants to spend time doing what they are not good at. (That is likely why the correlational studies show poor readers spend less time reading than good readers). When you teach your child the skills so he can do something proficiently (batting or reading), he then is able to achieve success. This success builds confidence and excitement that leads to further success.
- And… MOST IMPORTANTLY when a child is struggling you can help them achieve success by intervening with direct instruction targeted to build the essential skills! Look at what the child is doing incorrectly (the science shows us that difficulties reading are linked to a phonologic weakness) and then target instruction to specifically develop essential skills. For my son’s batting, his dad used direct practice with an old bucket. For proficient reading the effective tool is direct systematic phonics instruction that develop proficient reader phonologic processing of print that leads to reading success.
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This article was originally written in 2005 and updated with the link to Effective Intervention in 2021 website update. This article was written by Miscese Gagen, a mother with a passion for teaching children to read proficiently by using effective methods. Miscese is the author of the effective reading instructional programs Right Track Reading Lessons and Back on the Right Track Reading Lessons as well as a reading tutor with over 20 years’ experience successfully helping her students build proficient reading skills. The purpose of this article is to empower parents and teachers with information so they can help their children achieve reading success. We CAN improve reading proficiency, one student at a time! More information is located at www.righttrackreading.com ~ Copyright 2005-2021 Miscese R. Gagen