Continue AAR 3 or Move to Phonics Pathways?

[km123175]

My struggling reader (8.5) just finished AAR level 2 (we took over a year and a half for AAR1, and finished AAR2 in about 1 year). She is reading Bean and Ivy (easiest Lexile level of the bunch) with support - usually between 1/2 and 2/3 of each chapter herself and we chime in for the rest. She is proud to have read it, but doesn't initiate much reading on her own.


She still has trouble with tracking instead of looking at the first letter (or any letter in the word) and guessing (no diagnosis, but probable "issues"). She makes mistakes with words and sometimes keeps reading and other times does notice the problem and goes back to read again.

At the end of AAR 2 I did a quick teaching of each of the leap words and a quick run down of the new phonemes...then I had her read the rest of the reader aloud.  This worked well for her. She liked the challenge and the "finishing the level."

 

She wants to be able to read more independently and I want her to as well!  It's caused a block in other areas of her schooling because she wants us to read everything to her (and there's only one of me with 2 other kids who need work ask well). She wants to be able to read independently for those reasons (redoing lessons because you can't read the questions at the end is no fun)- but not really for joy (yet?).

 

As we got toward the end of AAR2, I felt like she was able to move through and progress quickly than the program allowed us.  It seems that the word cards (getting them memorized) seemed to slow us down because they took a long time to memorize and I felt like we couldn't keep moving forward with the stack of cards growing (each reader story was one day's worth of lesson when we got to it).

 

So, now I'm contemplating what to do with her.  I have Phonics Pathways (which worked very well for my oldest daughter). We've been using that for the last few days.  The progression/sequence is different than AAR; so, we're doing a bit of review work right now and will move toward the long vowel sounds soon (I think it's in 4 pages from where I placed her). We are easily doing 2 pages of this per day in about 15-20 minutes  (plus a read aloud in the evening).

 

I guess I'm wondering if there would be any benefit to continuing with AAR 3 (and eventually 4) beyond the extra practice and slower pace? Since I have the letter tiles (we also use AAS and will continue that) I can depend on those if we hit snags in Phonics Pathways.  Honestly, I feel like we don't need the $100 expense right now either, but I don't want to short circuit her reading progress either.

Support, encouragement, ideas encouraged. :)

Thanks,

Kimberly

[SilverMoon]

Has her vision been checked? My 7yo got stuck in the same place, and after getting glasses she was buddy-reading Harry Potter half a year later. One eye is near-sighted and one is far-sighted, which put a lag in seeing and her brain understanding what she was seeing.

 

Beyond that, Phonics Pathways is a very solid choice. If you can wrap your brain around the TM, Writing Road to Reading is great too. WRTR is what the above mentioned DC used.

[km123175]

I've got making an eye appointment on my to-do list. Thanks for that suggestion. 

[Syllieann]

I would stick with aar for her. Fluency is important. Even if she gets the rule, she needs to develop fluency to be a successful reader. In that respect, aar has more helps and isn't slowing down her overall reading (though maybe the rules portion). You can use the cursor on the fluency sheets. Having the sheets and the cards gives you practice options that don't give much in terms of context clues. If you don't want the expense of aar, You might want to make cards, use nonsense words, and a use cursor to supplement.

[MerryAtHope]

I would stick with aar for her. Fluency is important. Even if she gets the rule, she needs to develop fluency to be a successful reader. In that respect, aar has more helps and isn't slowing down her overall reading (though maybe the rules portion). You can use the cursor on the fluency sheets. Having the sheets and the cards gives you practice options that don't give much in terms of context clues. If you don't want the expense of aar, You might want to make cards, use nonsense words, and a use cursor to supplement.

 

Just to piggy-back--if you do continue with AAR, know that you don't have to do the whole stack of word cards in one review session. These stack up, but you can review just a portion of them for 2-3 minutes. Rotate through the stack. So...that review time doesn't need to slow down your overall pace, in other words. 

 

The guessing issues would make me say that whatever you use, make sure she is getting practice reading things without context clues (ie, things like word cards or fluency pages and not just stories or lists of words that all rhyme). It's important to keep working on those decoding skills so that she has a strong foundation with word-attack skills. Otherwise, that guessing habit becomes more of a hindrance as they progress to harder reading and to non-fiction or things like instructions and test questions where context doesn't help as much. Continue to walk her through daily demonstrations of how to use the blending procedure on harder words with the tiles, so that she keeps practicing it. For some kids, it doesn't feel natural until they've used it for a few years--that urge to guess based on context, word shape, first or last letter etc... is ingrained and can be a challenge to work through. Here's an article on word-guessing.

 

Vision processing is a good idea to look into as well, glad you have an appointment to check that. 

 

Hang in there!

[km123175]

Thanks Merry - I'm glad you chimed in for us as well.

 

Actually I do have a question about the visual processing...will a regular eye doctor check that out for us? Or should I seek some sort of specialist?  I'm trying to see if her tracking is a vision problem, a brain problem, or just a practicing problem.  ...Obviously there is something going on since she'll be 9 in October and it's still not natural for her.

 

 

I've got my older sets (Pre- and Level 1) for sale, maybe if both sell we'll get the Level 3 - the Phonics pathways does practice words out of context and not rhyming....but of course it doesn't have the same introduction to each phonoeme group...

 

For my oldest context and telling her the rule just a couple of times when she saw it was all she needed.  NOthing like a struggler to make you question your ability as a homeschooling momma. :)

 

 

 

[MerryAtHope]

Thanks Merry - I'm glad you chimed in for us as well.

 

Actually I do have a question about the visual processing...will a regular eye doctor check that out for us? Or should I seek some sort of specialist?  I'm trying to see if her tracking is a vision problem, a brain problem, or just a practicing problem.  ...Obviously there is something going on since she'll be 9 in October and it's still not natural for her.

 

 

I've got my older sets (Pre- and Level 1) for sale, maybe if both sell we'll get the Level 3 - the Phonics pathways does practice words out of context and not rhyming....but of course it doesn't have the same introduction to each phonoeme group...

 

For my oldest context and telling her the rule just a couple of times when she saw it was all she needed.  NOthing like a struggler to make you question your ability as a homeschooling momma. :)

 

If there's a significant problem (like a lazy eye or a child who can't hold convergence for 1 minute), your regular eye doctor will catch it. My oldest could sustain convergence when using all of his energy to focus on that, so his doctor never believed that he had a convergence issue. Vision processing issues are diagnosed by a specialist--check out www.covd.org. This is certainly one possible reason--but not the only one--why a child would still struggle at this age. Many other children do need more practice, or have dyslexia or other issues going on. Some just need an incremental presentation, and other presentations don't make sense to them. Some children have multiple issues and it can be like peeling the layers of an onion to find all of the issues. Hang in there! You are doing a good job with her because you care and are looking at possibilities, and you continue to work with her. She'll get there.