Cuddle and Read

 PLEASE NOTE  THE CONVERSION TO NEW STYLE SITE HAS MANGLED ALL THE ATTACHMENTS ..... PLEASE EMAIL ME IF YOU NEED ANY THAT HAVE MISBEHAVED  VIA  www.nmellor.com

Dear colleagues

This approach is for parents who are becoming stressed out about their child's reading "failure". Unfortunately this is a very sensitive issue and some parents may not be wiiling to dicuss their  anxieties until part way through the interview (see SCRIPTfor parents in the attachment below) when you have established a measure of  trust. So, selecting parents for this kind of work sometimes relies on a bit of guess work to begin with, to judge whether or not it is worth even exploring the ideas. In practice, most parents are more than happy to express their frustrations right at the start. However, you can also pick up hints about these stresses at, for example, informal internal review meetings in school, perhaps just by asking one or two gentle probes:  "What's it like reading with him at home?"  "Is she keen to practice or is it sometimes a bit of a struggle?" etc. An appointment can then be arranged for more detailed discussion.

The attachments are:

BookletNOPICTURES: this is text of the booklet for parents which you are at liberty to alter.

SHEETS 1- 12: these are the sheets of  the booklet as I have been using it. If the quality of the print is not too good, feel free to cut out and stick the pictures into the clean printout from the file "BookletNOPICTURES". Also, feel free to edit the text as you see fit.

Although it is quite easy to do, it is almost impossible to explain how to assemble these sheets -  if you play around enough with the sheets  and use a printer that will do double sided printing you should be able to figure out how to  load the originals so they print out to make a little "Ladybird" style booklet.

For example:

p.1. and  p.22  are on the other side of  the sheet containing the front and back cover

p2 and p.21 are on the other side of the sheet containing p. 3 and p.20

p4. and p.19 are on the other side of the sheet containing p.5 and p.18

and so on.

But for a double sided printer you also need to assemble alternate sheets so that they are rotated horizontally in a peculiar way I cannot begin to describe (kind of upside down I think, but not back to front, if you see what I mean). I told you it was too complicated to explain!  But it is actually quite easy to do.

 N.B The website has mucked up the order of the sheets and I can't seem to change it. I hope that isn't too confusing - you need to get them in the order SHEET1- SHEET12 to begin with and then fiddle about with them.

SCRIPT for parents: this is a summary of the kind of conversation you may be having with parents.

BRIEFarticle: as it says - this is a nice short article which sums up the ideas behind Cuddle and Read. It needs updating.

OLDARTICLE attempt:  this is a much longer, more technical and more out of date article which I was working on many years ago. It needs a severe looking at. However, even if the arguments around perceptual or cognitive sub-skills/processes  have now moved on, there is still a need to look closely at the actual experience of the  reading at home session. So, if it's all too technical and boring for you, or is too dated, just ignore it and concentrate on the interventions with the parents.

Please accept my apologies for the unfinished nature of this material. I had been meaning to sort these ideas out for ages. Now I am retired I thought I would have the time, but I haven't, but, more importantly, I can't do the research that needs to be done to examine the evidence about the effects of changing parents' approaches. I hope some keen researcher will pick this up and run with it (perhaps they already have - I haven't done an update literature review). It should be a doddle as an experimental set up:  perhaps a  couple of control groups (e.g. a no intervention/delayed intervention group  plus  a "normal" within-child sort of  reading support group) plus a Cuddle and Read group focused on the parent intervention.

There is more on Cuddle and Read generally on the website www.nmellor.com

(Please note, it may be that on some systems, the names of the attachments below may not display correctly. If that occurs, either download the documents one at a time to find the one you want or click on the download arrow at the right, if you can see one, to read the document names).