Hello!

This is my second attempt at teaching a child to read. With my son now 10 he finally gets it. I think it was last year. What he was stuck on was learning everything. He is good at math. With math you have rules and they don't change. I finally got him convinced that he was reading even if he did not know all the words. Not everyone does.

Now my next child is a girl and 7. I started again with 100 Easy Lessons. That doesn't work for her either. She can not remember the sound from one word to the next. Even if it was just said (!).  So I tried Sequential Spelling since she is still writing backwards.  With this I am writing the words on a white board. Which she could copy from. She looks at me and doesn't know what to do. Now she does get some 3 letter words. Will remember words from the TVguide that is on TV  LOL so I know it is there. With her she seems more worried about failing. I have told her she can just guess. Then we get 'net' read as 'ten'. I am just guessing about the worried about failing. Most of the time I will say a word like 'cat" for example and she will just spurt out some random constant like 'S' without even trying or maybe she is and I just don't understand her.  We have pretty much given up on vowels for now since they are frustrating and inconsistant.

Is it my lack of method? It just seems so much easier to other people. I read to them and they just don't pick it up very much.

some children are just harder to teach reading to. Sometimes they're just not ready at the age other children start PS. My daughter clicked just before turning 9 and now at 11 is reading better than most of the middle school neighbors.

Kathleen,

I can relate to what you are describing. My first child began to read at a typical age(6,7) for public school children. My second child could not get passed phonics for 5 years of schooling. Finally, she picked up the decoding skills needed, and now 2 years later reads at a high school level.  She still struggles with d abd b reversals, when she comes across words that start with these letters that she does not reccognize she tends to use deduction.  My son is in third grade now and is reading at typical second grade level. I am not concerned with this because he feels confident with his abilities and I don't want to discourage the love of reading.  When I was first dealing with reading issues I felt that I was somehow failing my child! So many experienced hs moms assured me that it would happen when the child is ready, I tried to rest in this as much as I could. Meanwhile, I tried numerous curriculums feeling that there must be one out there that could fix my situation. No! The experienced moms were right, it was time, and that was tough because it was not happening in (my) timing! My suggestion would be to continue on reading out loud with your children, make games out of words that your children will see often like; the word"stop"( who can find the most while out in the car?) , at the grocery give them a preprinted vertical list of the alphabet and pencil, when they see a word that starts with the letter on their sheet they can copy the word down next to the appropriate letter(they do not need to read these words, simply copy them). Of course, to do this you need plenty of time to be in the store, remember to be patient(!), and reward them in some way; a trip to the park later, a short visit to grandmas house(and they can show here how hard they have worked while shopping with mom), whatever works for your specific children! God Bless

One thing to read about is right-brained learners (visual-spatial learners).

I mention this because of her abilty to read the word correclty but backwards. Also a typical teaching way that you are using that uses writing the word out to learn it is not one conducive to right-brained learners. I don't know enough about your child to say she is a RB learner but she has a couple of symptoms. If you research and find out more then you can find the different teaching reading strategies for the RB learner and go from there.

I have one RB learner who did learn by typical intensive phonics but it was boring and took dedication and short lessons over about 9 months time. Back then I had no clue that something called a RB learner even existed. To update on him he is 11 now and I only learned of RB learners this year. He was struggling with memorizing math facts (for years) and is a bad speller. I have now adapted his spelling lessons to a RB strategy and he is flying through spelling and learning words so easily.

Also Dianne Craft speaks of RB learners and some articles are on her site dianne craft dot org.