I think my 11 y/o sister has big issues with reading comprehension. What can we do to help?

She’s moving up to secondary school next year and I can honestly say she’s probably finished one ‘real’ book in her whole life.

Her current teacher only teaches about climate change and political events plus a tiny bit of maths. For English he just reads to them. No tasks at all. Any complaints to school are brushed off. I know that as a whole teachers are trying their best, but he was like this even when they were in school.

Anyway, she can definitely read. If she doesn’t know for sure she’ll pronounce a word properly she won’t try to read it, but that’s pretty rare. The big issue is that it seems to me that she can’t actually understand any of it.

She was baking and read the recipe out loud. Then she asked me a question that she’d just read the answer to. She read it 3x through and didn’t get it. It wasn’t anything complicated. That made me stop and think a bit, and it seems like she actually can’t understand what she’s reading most of the time? There are many occasions when she reads something and asks a question that has just been answered in the text.

On the rare occasions she reads a book she is only interested in books that are more picture than words, which I think might be because it helps her work out what’s going on?

What can we do to help? I’m honestly surprised since my primary school English education was almost exclusively improving my vocabulary and reading comprehension.

Submitted February 17, 2021 at 11:38AM by pippi--longstocking https://ift.tt/3aw76Id