When Reading is a
Challenge
What Parents Can Do
Montgomery County Public Schools
Department of Curriculum and Instruction
What do you do
when you’re stuck?
• Think about a text you find difficult to
read: Your cell phone manual? Tax
forms? Technical writing out of your
field?
• Stress to your child that all of us have
trouble reading some types of text.
• Share the strategies you use to
unlock your own challenging texts.
Help Your Child Question the Text
• Begin with a comic
that your child
enjoys.
• Ask your child to
highlight details
and write
observations that
helped unlock the
cartoon.
Go to the
Washington
Post to find a
comic.
Ask Your Child...
• What do you think the comic
means?
– Dennis’ mom is very mad at someone.
– Gifts will not help her get over her
anger.
• How do you know?
– Dennis is leaving and pointing back as
if his mom is there.
– Dennis’ dad is arriving with flowers.
– Dennis tells his father, “...you’re
wastin‘ your time.”
What
does this
Dennis
the
Menace
comic
mean?
Possible Interpretations
• What don’t we know?
What
does this
Dennis
the
Menace
comic
mean?
– Was it Dennis or his father who angered
Dennis’ mom?
– Did she just get mad, or has she been
mad all day?
• What assumptions can we make,
based on the text?
– Dennis may have made his mom so mad
that she won’t be receptive to his dad’s
nice gesture.
– Dennis’ dad may have made his wife so
mad before he left for work that he is
trying to make up for it, but Dennis knows
she’s still angry.
So What?
Asking questions will also work with print texts:
• What kind of people are these characters?
(fiction)
• What is the subject and why is the author
writing? (nonfiction)
• Why is the author telling me this?
• Why does the author choose this word?
• How does this relate to what I know?
• If the text is fiction, what movie does it create
in my head?
Skip ahead to the grade level of your child...or look at all the texts.
Try it with a sixth grade text:
The train pulled out and settled into a steady motion. Hortensia and Mama took out
their crocheting. Mama was using a small hook and white cotton thread to make
carpetas, lace doilies, to put under a lamp or a vase. She held up her work to Esperanza
and smiled. “Would you like to learn?”
Esperanza shook her head. Why did Mama bother crocheting lace? They had no vases
or lamparas to put on top of them. Esperanza leaned her head against the window. She
knew she did not belong here. She was Esperanza Ortega from El Rancho de las Rosas.
She crossed her arms tight and stared out the window.
For hours, Esperanza watched the undulating land pass in front of her. Everything
seemed to remind her of what she had left behind: the nopales reminded her of Abuelita
who loved to eat the prickly pear cactus sliced and soaked in vinegar and oil; the dogs
from small villages that barked and ran after the train reminded her of Marisol, whose
dog, Capitan, chased after trains the same way. And every time Esperanza saw a shrine
decorated with crosses, flowers, and miniature statues of saints next to the rails, she
couldn’t help but wonder if it had been someone’s father who had died on the tracks....
Pam Munoz Ryan’s Esperanza Rising
What questions could a reader ask?
• What is crocheting?
– Can I find a video on crocheting on YouTube?
• What do the words carpetas, lamparas, and nopales
mean?
– How is carpetas defined in context?
– What clues are there to the meaning of lamparas and
nopales?
– Will a free translation site tell me if I still don’t know?
• What does the word undulating mean?
– How does context help me match it to the right meaning
in the dictionary?
• What do the images in the last paragraph make me
see in my head?
– Do any of the images remind me of things I’ve seen?
Try it with a seventh grade text:
Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush.
He surveyed the fence, and all the gladness left him and deep melancholy settled down
upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow,
and existence but a burden. Sighing he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost
plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed
streak with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed fence....
At this dark and hopeless moment an inspiration burst upon him! Nothing less than a
great, magnificent inspiration.
He took up his brush and went tranquilly to work. Ben Rogers hove in sight
presently—the very boy, of all boys, whose ridicule he had been dreading...
“Hello, old chap, you got to work, hey?”
Tom wheeled suddenly and said: “Why it’s you, Ben! I warn’t noticing....Does a boy
get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”
That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept the
brush daintily back and forth—stepped back to note the effect—added a touch here and
there—criticized the effect again—Ben watching every move and getting more and
more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said:
“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
What questions could a reader ask?
• What do the words whitewash and
melancholy mean?
– What clues are there in the paragraph?
– If the clues in the text don’t help, how does
context help me find the meaning in the
dictionary?
• What do the images of Tom painting make
me see in my head? How is Tom feeling?
• Have I ever felt the way Tom feels about
Ben Rogers?
• How does Tom get Ben to want to paint for
him? What is the tone of this passage?
(What details make this passage funny?)
Try it with an eighth grade text:
dispatch you—leave
quickly
With your safest
haste—quickly, which
offers your best
chance to leave safely
cousin—niece
their purgation—
purging, or clearing,
themselves of
suspicion
William Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
DUKE FREDERICK [to Rosalind]
Mistress, dispatch you with your safest haste,
And get you from our court.
ROSALIND
Me, uncle?
DUKE FREDERICK
You, cousin.
Within these ten days if that thou beest found
So near our public court as twenty miles,
Thou diest for it.
ROSALIND
I do beseech your Grace,
Let me the knowledge of my fault bear with me....
Never so much as in a thought unborn
Did I offend your Highness.
DUKE FREDERICK
Thus do all traitors.
If their purgation did consist in words
They are as innocent as grace itself.
Let it suffice to say that I trust thee not.
What questions could a reader ask?
• Why are there notes on the left page?
– What does the Duke mean when he says dispatch
you?
– Why does he call her cousin after she has called him
uncle?
• Is he warning her or threatening her?
– How does the rest of the passage provide clues?
• How can I put the speech into my own words?
– For example, in the Duke’s second speech, I might
say, “If I see you within 20 miles of my house in the
next ten days, I’ll kill you.”
• How do I feel when someone unjustly accuses
me of something I didn’t do?
Try it with a ninth grade text:
When Atticus looked down at me I saw the expression on his face that always made
me expect something. “Do you know what a compromise is?”
“Bending the law?”
“No, an agreement reached by mutual concessions. It works this way,” he said. “If
you’ll concede the necessity of going to school, we’ll go on reading every night just as
we always have. Is it a bargain?”
“Yes, sir!”
“We’ll consider it sealed without the usual formality,” Atticus said, when he saw me
preparing to spit.
As I opened the front screen door Atticus said, “By the way, Scout, you’d better not
say anything at school about our agreement.”
“Why not?”
“I’m afraid our activities would be received with considerable disapprobation by the
more learned authorities.”
Jem and I were accustomed to our father’s last-will-and-testament diction, and we
were at all times free to interrupt Atticus for a translation when it was beyond our
understanding.
“Huh, sir?”
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
What questions could a reader ask?
• Why does she call her dad Atticus?
– I still don’t quite understand this.
• What are mutual concessions?
– How does the rest of the paragraph provide clues?
• ...considerable disapprobation by the more learned
authorities...Who talks like that??
– If I break it down word by word, then the only word I
don’t know is disapprobation. Dictionary?
• What does Scout mean by his last-will-and-testament
diction?
– I know that diction means word choice, since we talk
about that in our papers. So what is word choice that
sounds like a will?
• Is Scout’s relationship with her dad anything like my
relationship with my parents?
Try it with a tenth grade text:
Now along came this tramp, this public nuisance
who used to scrounge a living round the streets of Ithaca—
...Arnaeus was his name...
but all the young men called him Irus for short...
Well he came by to rout the king from his own house
and met Odysseus now with a rough, abusive burst:
“Get off the porch, you old goat, before I haul you
off by the leg!”
A killing look,
and the wily old soldier countered, “Out of your mind?
What damage have I done you? What have I said?...
You’re another vagrant, just like me, I’d say,
and it lies with the gods to make us rich or poor. So
keep your fists to yourself, don’t press your luck, don’t rile me,
Try it with a tenth grade text:
Or old as I am, I’ll bloody your lip...”
“Look who’s talking!” the beggar rumbled in anger....
“Belt up—so the lords can see us fight it out.
How can you beat a champion half your age?”
And Antinous, that grand prince, hearing them wrangle,
Broke into gloating laughter, calling out to the suitors,
“Friends, nothing like this has come our way before—
what sport some god has brought the palace now!
...Here’s what I propose,
Now, whoever wins this bout and proves the stronger,
let that man step up and take his pick of the lot!
What’s more, from this day on he feasts among us—
no other beggar will we allow inside....”
Homer’s The Odyssey, translated by Fagles
What questions could a reader ask?
• Since this is a poem, shouldn’t I stop at the
end of a line?
– But wait, does it make sense if I stop after the
word nuisance?
• What does the word rout mean?
– Are there clues in the whole line—rout the king
from his own house?
• Who is the wily old soldier? Odysseus?
• What does the word vagrant mean?
– Are there clues in the speech? Dictionary?
• Why is Antinous trying to get them to fight?
Do I know anyone like him?
Try it with an eleventh grade text:
So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead.
Not the dead of sick and ailing friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back
from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in
judgment.
The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had
left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It
was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, eyeless
conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now,
the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They
became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths.
They sat in judgment.
Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from
other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish.
They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was
mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without masters; walking altogether
like harmony in a song.
“What she doin’ coming back here in dem overhalls?...Where she left dat young lad
of a boy she went off here wid?...”
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
What questions could a reader ask?
• Whom has this woman buried?
– What does sudden dead tell me?
• Who are the people on the porch?
– What kinds of jobs do they do?
– Whom do they judge?
• What do the metaphors in the third
paragraph tell me about these
people? Do I know anyone like them?
• What images do I see, based on the
description?
Try it with a twelfth grade text:
The smell of blood, warm and wet, rose from the floor and settled into the solemn
stillness of the hospital air. I could feel it like an unhurried chill in my joints, a slowmoving red that smoldered in a floating ether of dull, gray smoke. All around me, the
bare walls expanded and converged into a relentless stretch of white. The bedsheet
white of the hallway was an anxious white I knew by heart. White, the color of
mourning, the standard color for ghosts, bones, and funerals, swallowed in the surface
calm of the hospital halls.
A scattering of gunshots tore through the plaster walls. Everything was unfurling,
everything, and I knew I was back there again, as if the tears were always pooled in
readiness beneath my eyes. It was all coming back, a fury of whiteness rushing against
my head with violent percussive rage. The automatic glass doors closed behind me with
a sharp sucking sound.
Arlington Hospital was not a Saigon military hospital. Through the hydraulic doors, I
could see the lush green lawn that stretched languidly across an immense parking lot. A
few feet beyond, a spray of water blossomed upward, then rotated in a soundless circle
wide enough to reach the far outcropping of grass. The American flag, flown sky-high
from a sturdy iron pole, still swelled and snapped in the wind. I knew I was not in
Saigon.
Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge
What questions could a reader ask?
• What do the images in
the first paragraph tell
me about the hospital?
• Where is she now, and
where is back there?
• To what can I compare
the sound of the
automatic glass doors?
• What do I picture as the
narrator talks about
these images?
What other questions can I ask?
• What kind of people are these characters?
(fiction)
• What is the subject and why is the author
writing? (nonfiction)
• Why is the author telling me this?
• Why does the author choose this word?
• How does this relate to what I know?
• If the text is fiction, what movie does it create
in my head?
Tips for Fostering Successful Reading
• Set aside time for reading without distractions.
• Have your child write about what he/she has
read.
• Have your child mark important passages with
sticky notes (or, if your child has an electronic
reader, such as an iPad, use it to take notes).
• Read portions of the book and discuss it with
your child if you have time.
• Host a “book club” for your child and others
who are reading the same book.
• Encourage your child to ask for the teacher’s
help if these strategies are not enough.