Lutheran here - I've always understood "Reformed" to refer particularly to the Calvinistic branch of the Reformation, not to both the Calvinistic branch and the Lutheran branch. Also, I thought a sizable chunk of the Reformed practiced infant baptism - at the very least, I thought most all Presbyterians did? But I have no idea the ratio of Presbyterians to other Reformed churches. At least for Lutherans (and Catholic and Orthodox), we do believe that God gives salvation through baptism, and we do consider baptized infants to be fellow believers. For us baptism is first and foremost *God's* commitment to the child. What you wrote matches how I've seen (Calvinistic) Reformed beliefs about infant baptism described, though.

Two from Winnie the Pooh: Pooh: "You never can tell with bees." Eeyore: "You're a good friend, Pooh - not like some." (I don't know why, but the P/A horribleness of that line makes me laugh every time.)

If it's a traditional IRA, the taxable amount is figured on an 8606 (according to my mom).

When we were at that stage - dd's phonics skills could decode hundreds of words yet she couldn't read most readers because of all. the. blankety-blank. sight. words :mad: (also at the end of first) - I went ahead and went through ElizabethB's "teach sight words phonetically" page that summer. It was kind of frustrating (for me), because it was a lot more effort to learn 20 words with eight different phonics patterns than it was to learn one phonics pattern by going through 20 words. But it did wonders for dd's ability to read real-world stuff and her overall reading confidence. We then went back to working through our phonics book. So I guess that was option e combined with option a.

WRT Mother Gothel, I think my kids got that she was a "bad guy" from the start, even from age 2-3. She's introduced as being generally selfish and kidnaps baby Rapunzel, so they were primed to see her as "bad" even when she was pretending (creepily) to be "good". I don't think they ever saw her as anything *but* bad - she wasn't really a hidden bad guy like Hans, because the *audience* was always aware she was bad, even if Rapunzel didn't know that. WRT Flynn, well, imo the movie is pretty morally confused on him :-/ - he's a thief with a heart of gold, and generally the "heart of gold" part trumps the "thief" part wrt the good guy/bad guy question. I'm pretty sure my kids saw him as the lovable-flawed-hero he was meant to be - and yeah, that means that the moral wrongness of his thievery (and all the other crimes committed by the rest of the lovable-rogues) were entirely overlooked by the kids - as the movie also pretty well overlooked them. They were all just "good guys" <sigh>. WRT Hans - I think they got pretty well he was a bad guy after the reveal, even my then-3yo, and they seemed to retain it upon further watching - no one, even the little one, seemed to forget that. My younger kids have had problems with spy-type shows, where there are multiple apparent shifts in loyalty (good, then double-crosses the good guys, then turns out to be a triple-cross, betraying the bad guys; or the reverse where a bad guy then seems good, but then is bad again). They can handle *one* switch in loyalty - from apparent bad to really good, or apparent good to really bad - but that's it. Any further shifts back and forth just confused and upset them. (We stopped watching those shows with them around after we realized that.) But even at a young age, they had no problems understanding and retaining *one* switch.

A bit different, but I also turned down a chance for my girls to try out for the competition team at our studio (though we continued with the studio at recreation level). At the time it was because the competition schedule for the upcoming year included both weekends of Holy Week (the weekend of Palm Sunday, and the following Good Friday/Holy Saturday/Easter Sunday weekend); I'm not going to *plan* to miss the highest Holy Days of the year for anything. I felt really uneasy about it, though - didn't want to be holding them back or anything. But in the past few years, I've grown more comfortable with being a family that just isn't going to be a competition dance family. It might close off dance-related doors, but it's not going to ruin their future as *good adults*. I came to terms with the reality that we *can't* do all the good things that are out there to do, and that doesn't have to be a tragedy. We can appreciate living in a world where those good things exist, and appreciate the impressive results of talent and effort, without pursuing that level of performance ourselves; aka, I can appreciate good things without needing to *have* those good things. We're putting the most important things first, and if that means we have to turn down some good opportunities, because they would conflict with the most important things - then it's a trade-off, it comes with costs - but they are costs that are ultimately worth it. It's given me some peace about deliberately not pursuing dance-related excellence at a competition level - because we are instead deliberately pursuing a more fundamental excellence. ETA: I agree with pp that I wouldn't think taking a year off at this age would matter wrt closing off serious dance study, but I don't have first-hand knowledge. My second-hand understanding is that starting at age 7 or 8 is generally fine. Also, I agree with a pp that serious ballet and competition dance are two different (and mostly non-overlapping) paths.

To me it sounds like he wants contradictory things (as do many of us): he wants to be successful but he doesn't want to do some of un enjoyable bits that go into being successful. He wants you to help him get those difficult/unpleasant bits done, excepting for the times when he doesn't want to do those things (and so gets annoyed with you for pushing). But he doesn't want you to stop helping, because he *does* want to succeed and wants your help in making succeeding easier. Except that "easier" isn't the same thing as "easy", and while he wants to succeed in theory, in practice his desire to avoid the unpleasantness is stronger than his determination to succeed. Or at least that was me in college. I wanted to succeed while also prioritizing doing things that gave me pleasure over things that didn't. Prioritizing "play" (that which gives pleasure) over "work" (that which doesn't) doesn't have to mean defaulting to easy, low-effort forms of play like video games; it can involve doing quite a lot of good, productive, effort-ful things. But ime it still erodes self-discipline and really hurts long-term success. In my case I was well aware of the problem and welcomed help in solving it - until it came down to actually making the hard choice to tackle the unpleasant task, in which case I found some reason or other to put it off. And did my best to avoid the people who were providing help in the form of accountability. Until I either did it at the last minute or failed to do it - so in either case it was over - and recommitted to doing what it took to succeed. Until it came down to doing the hard task, and I started the whole procrastination cycle again. I refused to give up either side - I was determined to both succeed and yet continued to refuse to do the hard bits that went into succeeding - and eventually drove myself into a depression over it. I later realized that I wanted help to make it easier to do the unpleasant things, only no amount of help could make it *pleasant* - and I was very much in the habit of only doing things that were pleasant. (It took the looming threat of deadlines and failure to meet deadlines to spur me to doing unpleasant things - that usually were pleasant enough once I got going (except for the immense time crunch stress).) And so I welcomed help-that-makes-things-pleasant-or-easier, and help-that-removes-obstacles - but not help-with-working-through-obstacles. Because I didn't *want* to work through obstacles, it wasn't *pleasant* to work through obstacles - so I'd put it off till later, and later again, until I magically felt up to dealing with obstacles or they went away. And most school deadlines, when you fail to deal with them, they *do* go away. There's consequences, of course, but in the short term they felt easier to deal with than the obstacle itself. Idk, I just see myself in your description of your son: both wanting to succeed while not wanting to deal with the more unpleasant obstacles on the path to success, and the contradictory desires fighting with each other - and with you. :grouphug:

I don't record *all* my reading, but I do try to keep a reading log of what I read for my amateur research project (which is basically all the non-fiction I've read - it all ties in one way or another). Most of the worthwhile books I read I end up writing about in my reading journal, so that's the main way I record them. I try to jot down titles of journal articles in my reading journal, to keep track of them, but that's been hit or miss, unfortunately.

Yes, that's the one.

Does she do well with computations in real life? I was assuming her test scores were accurately reflecting her computational skills, but this sounds like it might be just a test thing, or at least partly a test thing?

What kind of computation mistakes is she making? Are her answers reasonable: in the general ballpark of the right answer? Or are her answers sometimes wildly wrong, off by a magnitude or more? And, very importantly, can she *tell* whether her answer is reasonable or is way off? Aka, how's her number sense and estimation skills? Since she's going into medicine, I think it's important to have enough number sense and estimation ability that she can recognize whether the calculator's answer makes sense. Being able to calculate medicine doses accurately - and being able to *recognize* a nonsensical answer when you see it - are really, really important. My engineering professors got extremely upset when kids couldn't recognize that they'd forgotten to change their calculators from degrees to radians, and just blindly wrote the totally-wrong answer down without even thinking about it. The ability to judge whether an answer makes sense is important for everyone, and in your shoes, I'd work hard to help your dd develop the ability to reliably estimate and judge the reasonableness of answers, and also that she gets in the habit of *always* double-checking her work for reasonableness. (If she's always been bad at computation, she might just assume she's getting most of them wrong no matter what, and not really try to check her work, figuring it doesn't matter anyway. That's how my oldest was with spelling: she knew she was going to get it wrong, so she just slapped down any old thing to get it over with and moved on, not bothering to double-check it, because it was going to be wrong no matter how much effort she put in, so she might as well give minimal effort and end the frustration faster, since the end result was the same either way.) My surface understanding is that if her issues with computation are due to v/s or something not-math LD related, then developing good number sense and estimation skills so she can accurately judge the reasonableness of an answer is probably an achievable goal. You connected v/s and not being good at pesky memory things to her issues with computation: is that because she misremembers math facts and that's why she gets things wrong, or because she can't remember the steps of the procedures? Does she do any better if she has math fact tables? Or if she has the steps of all the procedures written down and can reference them as she does the problems? From my limited experience with my dyslexic v/s oldest (who is weaker computationally than conceptually, but not to the extent of your dd), once she's grasped the overall conceptual point, if I walk her through each step of the procedure and explicitly connect it to the overall point, she usually has little trouble remembering the order of the procedure. Procedures with a lot of steps, a lot of "moving parts", can cause trouble, especially because she can get nine bits right out of ten and still get the overall answer wrong. (Her mistakes are usually getting math facts wrong (and memorizing them is coming slowly).). So her issues are usually how one small error makes the whole thing wrong, and that her computation number sense is limited by her iffy memory of facts: she just doesn't see the right answer at a glance, and sometimes over complicates the problem (adding more moving parts and so more chances to make a computation error) because of it. Anyway, this sounds to me like an analogous situation to "learning to spell well enough to use a spellchecker effectively": get your number sense and estimation skills strong enough that you can recognize wrong answers, esp. very wrong answers, when you see them, and be able to effectively do something about it - that you can factcheck not just *your* computations, but factcheck the calculator's, too.

My oldest dd is similarish, in that physically writing was a challenge for several years (and maybe still is, but overall she's vastly improved, so that it's not an obvious issue anymore), which caused problems with writing math down. *And* she had problems putting her thinking into words even orally - she could intuitively get the answer, but it was the work of several years to teach how to *explain* her thinking to me (whether orally or written). So telling me her thinking orally was also hard. Aka writing down her math work was hard for both handwriting reasons and thinking reasons. But the handwriting difficulty definitely motivated her to not want to write anything more than necessary. I think half of our getting-math-done difficulties deal with focus issues stemming from her avoiding the *writing* part of math. (Turned out a major factor in her difficulties with SM's intensive practice was the *lack of sufficient room to write her answers* (part of her difficulties meant that she couldn't write small). I got her a graph paper notebook to use to show her work whenever she needed more room, and things got a lot easier.) Anyway, if your ds can dictate a thorough explanation of his work (in our house, "showing your work" wrt word problems means all relevant equations, a diagram when needed, and an answer in a complete sentence; her computations can be done in her head or on paper), where you're pretty sure you aren't giving unintentional hints or clues via body language that he wouldn't have if he wrote them on his own - then it does seem like more of a physical writing issue. He *can* fully communicate his thinking in words/equations in understandable-to-others ways - he just can't do it via *writing*. (Does he have just as much difficulty writing his math on the whiteboard as he does on paper? I know for my dd, writing on the whiteboard went much better, because there was a lot more room and she could write bigger.) A book I have on dyslexia, dysgraphia, and oral and written learning disorder defines dysgraphia as impairment in letter writing skills. It can include impairments in legibility (how well others can read their writing), automaticity (how many legible letters they can form in 15sec), and speed (how long it takes to complete a writing task). It's fairly common for dysgraphic children to have difficulties in learning to spell written words. So, yeah, researching dysgraphia sounds like a reasonable starting point. HTH

I agree. When I first opened this thread, I was thinking that dh and I don't keep secrets from each other. I mean, there's things I don't tell him, but I *would*, if he asked or if they became relevant - we don't deliberately keep things back from each other. However, my dh is a pastor, and he is privy to *lots* of things that are none of my business. And he takes his promises of confidentiality seriously - he doesn't tell me anything that is explicitly or implicitly expected to remain between him and the person who told him. It never really occurred to me that "have no secrets between each other" would/should mean "tell other people's secrets that I am privy to". As pp said, if he needs to unload a little of *his* feelings and troubles wrt carrying the burden of others' problems, then he might tell me a bit with no names or specifics, but that's it. Just because I'm the pastor's wife doesn't mean I'm entitled to know what people have confided to their pastor, kwim? Maybe it helps that the *fact* that dh is keeping other people's secrets is itself *not* a secret - I know that secrets exist and their general topic (stuff unnamed people confided to their pastor). I'd do the same wrt stuff my sister or someone wanted me to keep confidential: mention to dh that she told me stuff, but that she wanted it kept confidential (if needed, I'd keep the identity of the person secret as well - leave it as an unnamed person). Kind of a middle ground between "no secrets between spouses" and "keeping others' secrets safely" - and my dh would be sworn to secrecy wrt the fact that the secret even existed (just as I am wrt anything that he alludes to).

I'm mad on your behalf for all the unnecessary trouble your bil stirred up, and your mil's understandable upsetness at having the opportunity to go dangled in front of her with no consideration for what was best for her or anyone, and that you and your dh have to deal with the fallout of that :grouphug:. In your shoes, I'd just plan that she's not going to go, because there's next to no chance that someone is going to volunteer to take her, especially with the extremely short notice involved. And honestly, I'd be strongly in favor of you and your dh just calling it now, and emailing tonight that given the original plans of the cousins and how hard getting up and going would be on your MIL, you are reverting back to the original plan of her only attending the memorial with everyone. Because, let's face it, it's what's clearly going to happen by default anyway, so might as well make life easier on everyone and be the ones to just make the decision, instead of everyone punting it back on someone else. The main difficulty that I see is your mil's upsetness over not going, but since not going is pretty much a foregone conclusion, that's going to be an issue anyway. Since you strongly feel that it's best for both you/dh *and* your mil for her to not go - and no one is going to make it happen if you don't (and you aren't) - just call it and let your dh's email be that she's not going for all the very good reasons you've outlined here.

Per the Nordstrom link for the Barracuda jeans, they are "wearable abstract art" ;). By art standards, $425 might be a steal :lol:.

My youngest had a favorite youtube music group when he was six months. He'd go to sleep on dh's lap, while dh was watching youtube videos. Dh got into this one group (Piano Guys) and watched mostly that while rocking ds for a few months. And then, around six months, ds started crying if dh tried to watch anything else but Piano Guys at bedtime. Even other music videos wouldn't do.

The way I do SM (with my older girl, doing 4B) is having two math sessions a day, one with IP or CWP (done 1 semester behind the tb/wb) and one with the tb/wb. With my younger girl, doing 2A, I do one math session a day, which can be either tb/wb only or IP only (done 1 semester behind the tb/wb) or a combo of both (and I randomly include assorted problems from CWP). If there's a lot of tb/wb work (or it's a bad math day), I just do the tb/wb; if the tb/wb is easy/fast, I throw in a few IP pages; if we haven't gotten to IP recently (or we're working through a hard IP section), I have an IP-only day. At some point we'll move to two math sessions and the same schedule as my older girl. (Also, in the past, I have assigned a page of CWP each day as an independent warmup sort of work, done roughly a semester behind.) It *is* a lot of math, though, esp for my older girl - IP for her is the time equivalent of a whole second program. So far I think it's worthwhile, and it keeps the wb easy, but it is a significant time investment for us, and my older dd complains about doing too much math on a semi-regular basis. I run all the books mostly independently of each other, and so far they haven't felt like doing IP is holding them back from progressing to the next level, because we start a new tb/wb when the old one is done, and start a new IP when the old one is done (plus IP is done as a review/extension, not as part of the main math progression). I sort of try to keep the IP at a semester behind, and I fiddle a bit to keep things on track-ish - if we get too behind I'll have a few IP-only days; if we get too ahead, I'll do CWP-only days or even tb/wb only days (or more recently, Life of Fred days - took the opportunity of being "ahead" with IP to do an actual second program) - but I don't fuss much about it. In your shoes, I think I'd choose *either* IP or EP. The Extra practice books are the same level as the workbook, and are for when you dc need, well, extra practice to master the work (or as a review, to keep things sharp). The Intensive Practice books, otoh, go further and deeper, so you are practicing your skills on more difficult problems that you've not seen before. Since your dd is bored, it sounds like she might not need the extra practice books, especially if she doesn't find the IP books too challenging. Also, you don't have to do all of everything. I generally do all the wb and IP (but I might start to rethink that wrt IP, because, as I said, it takes up a lot of our time). But I only do the practices/reviews in the tb if my dc need the practice, and I pick and choose CWP problems - for example, if a given chapter is easy for my dc, I only have them do the extra challenging ones. When things are harder for my dc, I usually take the time to provide extra teaching and practice and handholding, sufficient for them to master it, but sometimes on the harder IP problems, I count me working through the problem with my dc following along as sufficient and call it a day.

I went through a period like that. I turned the corner after sleeping 10 hours a night for a month. Things I do to prevent a recurrence (which I also did alongside sleeping for 10 hr/night to get out of it): *light therapy from Sept-Apr (I have problems with SAD, and untreated it really makes the brain fog and low energy so much worse). *daily exercise (outdoor walk and some stretches; I want to add in some strengthening work) *vitamins (omega 3s, a multi, and a B complex) *relatively low-carb, high protein, moderate fat diet (carbs, esp without exercise, make my brain go all mushy) *more sleep than I used to get (I used to aim for 7-8 hours, but now I aim for 8-9) Also, when I start to feel foggy/tired while doing sedentary "uses brain more than muscles" things, and it's probably not a "need sleep" matter, I try to get up and do something fairly mindless but relatively active (and useful). For me that's usually house-related chores - put away the dishes, straighten the table, put away a load of laundry or something. Bonus if I can go do some simple outdoor chore and get some fresh air and light. I'm not always very good at doing this, but it helps a lot when I do. I find that for me (where depression is often my biggest enemy), I can get into a vicious cycle where I'm unable to think so I quit doing thinking things and so become less able to think; likewise I feel low energy so I quit doing things that take energy and so become even more low energy. Breaking the cycle by forcing myself to get up and *do* something mindless but active (instead of going to a even-less-thinking-required *sedentary* activity) helps me in both mind and body.

I had my dd do multiplication this way for a while, because there was too much going on at a time for her with the standard algorithm - she'd always make at least one computation mistake per problem, and it was demoralizing. Figured it would do her good to separate out some of the moving parts (so to speak). After a week or so, she went back to the standard algorithm and did fine. I was absent the day my class learned FOIL, and it felt like I'd missed being initiated into the secrets of math or something. I didn't know what the teacher meant when she said to FOIL something, and when I'd ask a fellow student, they'd say (in accents of horror), "You don't know how to *foil*!?! Why, you can't do *anything* if you don't know how to *foil*!" But for some reason they never followed that up with an explanation of what FOIL was :-/. Very frustrating. Eventually I got clued in, and after all that build-up it was *so* anti-climactic. "It's just multiplying terms??? That's *it*?!? What kind of fundamental math secret is this!?!"

The tax rates in our house (in IL) are about 9.7%, but the assessed value is about 1/3 of the sale price of the house. So I guess that's more like 3.3%. ETA: The assessed value doesn't have anything to do with the sale price - it just happens to be around a third. The assessed value fluctuates some each year and I have no idea what it is based on.

IP lines up with each *chapter*, but not with each *lesson*. When I did just the textbook and IP, I did a chapter in the text and then the corresponding chapter in IP. (ETA: If the student can't go through a whole chapter of the tb without additional practice, then ime probably it would be better to use IP *alongside* the wb than as a *replacement* for the workbook.) Now I use the tb and wb together (dd needed more computation practice even though she got the concepts fairly easily), and do IP a semester behind, to both review and go deeper.

The Messengers: Discovered, by Lisa Clark: https://www.amazon.com/Messengers-Discovered-Lisa-M-Clark/dp/0758654561/

One book I've read that has helped me is "How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor", by James K. A. Smith. It's an accessible introduction to Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age", which addresses the question of why it was that in 1500 Christendom it was almost impossible *to* doubt God's existence, but now in the 21st century West, it's nearly impossible to imagine *not* doubting God's existence - that in 1500 Christendom, God's existence was mostly unquestioned, while now God's functional absence is now the default assumption - and how that change in assumptions has changed the nature of belief. It's very helpful wrt uncovering a lot of secularizing assumptions that even most believers assume, that change and undermine their beliefs - so that you can examine those assumptions and see if you really *do* believe they are true. It's best paired with a book that discusses the faith from a non-modern-secular viewpoint - so that once you've become aware of your secular blind spots and that they materially affect how you live your faith, you can learn about the faith from an alternate, non-secularly-influenced viewpoint. Ideally this means reading old books (just like C.S. Lewis advocated) - reading the Church Fathers, or the Reformers themselves (and not just their contemporary interpreters). (I used Smith's book combined with Taylor's actual book, with all its extra words ;), to try to be able to understand the medieval Catholic assumptions well enough to be able to read my tradition's confessional documents (Book of Concord) with *those* more-historically-accurate assumptions instead of importing my modern secular ones.) It can also include reading contemporary books by people who have explicitly worked to divest themselves of their secular blinders. C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity" would be a great one for that - it's not quite contemporary with us (so provides a different POV in that sense), plus Lewis was a medieval scholar who was well aware of, and critical of, the impact of modernity. And wrt a good old book, C.S. Lewis' bit on reading old books that I linked above was as an intro to St. Athanasius' "On the Incarnation", and that would be an excellent book to read.

I haven't used Abeka, but people I respect think it's a strong program. From my quick read-through of the syllabus, it does look like it's main focus is on learning all the phonograms ("special sounds") - which is a *great* foundation for reading. Their charts ought to provide you with everything you need to sound out any syllable you come across :thumbup:. Looking over the syllabus, Abeka phonics does also teach syllable division and common prefixes and suffixes, which is the basis for reading multi-syllable words. But they might not explicitly highlight the process for reading multi-syllable words - they don't highlight it in the detailed scope & sequence, in any case, even though all the building blocks are there. One option is to go back through all Abeka's syllable division work and prefix/suffix work - any lesson that involves multi-syllable words. Another option is to go through ElizabethB's free Multi-syllable Phonics materials. There's a *ton* of good stuff at that link. A pp mentioned REWARDS - I've done that with my oldest, and it is very good. New it's a bit pricey; I got an older edition used on Amazon for not too much (student book; teacher guide). Here's their basic procedure for working through long, unfamiliar words: 1) Underline all the vowel sounds, saying the sound as you do (and Abeka's charts would be a big help in doing this). This tells you how many syllables there are: number of vowel sounds = number of syllables. 2) Circle all the prefixes and suffixes, starting from the outside in. (So for prefixes, start at the beginning of the word and work forward; for suffixes, start at the end of the word and work backwards.) 3) Divide the base word into syllables (this part is implicit in REWARDS - usually it's pretty intuitive with the vowels underlined and the prefixes and suffixes identified - but you can make it explicit, too). 4. Loop your finger under each syllable, saying each part as you go. (If your dd was having problems reading each part, Abeka's charts would help here, too.) 5. Read the word at normal speed. In the lessons, they learn multi-letter vowels sounds (with a focus on being flexible, trying the first sound for that spelling first, and if it doesn't make a word, trying the next sound), prefixes and suffixes, and then practice the whole procedure step-by-step on a set of words (even if the student could read them on their own). Later they add in reading practice, where you only go through the whole procedure on paper if you are having problems with a word; otherwise if you can read the words without working through them on paper (the goal) you can. Toward the end, they have reading passages, where they pre-teach harder words. The All About Reading method I linked earlier has these steps: 1) Divide the word into syllables. 2) Label the syllable types (do this if you've learned the types in Abeka; if you haven't, then I'd skip this step - it's a short-cut to figuring out which sounds to use, but you can figure them out using your Abeka charts at the next step, too.) 3) Decode each syllable just like you would a one-syllable word. _____3a) Touch each letter/phonogram in the syllable and say the sound, using your Abeka charts to figure out the sounds as needed, just like Abeka taught you. _____3b) Go back to the beginning of the syllable and blend the first two sounds together, running your finger underneath the letters as you say them. _____3c) Go back to the beginning of the syllable and blend all the sounds together, running your finger underneath the letters as you say them. 4) Go back to the beginning of the word and slide your finger under the word, saying the sounds of the syllables. 5) Say the word at a normal speed. There are lots of similarities between the REWARDS method and the AAR method (and ElizabethB's method, too) - because they are all teaching you to do the same thing: phonetically read multi-syllable words. *AAR focuses more on identifying and blending the individual sounds in each syllable; *ElizabethB focuses more on practicing the common syllables to automaticity (it's a lot like AAR, only instead of decoding each syllable, you just say each syllable; if you have problems, you look up your handy syllable chart and use that to help decode it); *and REWARDS focuses more on isolating the base word and identifying the vowel sounds, and assumes the rest of decoding is automatic (which makes sense, since it is aimed toward older students). It might help to pick one of the methods and practice it yourself. Open a book, and every longish word you come to, write it out (on paper or a whiteboard) and work through it step-by-step. After you've done a dozen or so words, hopefully it will start to click with you. You can try all the methods and see which you like best, or which one clicks with you (once one clicks, the others will probably click shortly afterward). If none of them click with you even after you've worked through 20-30 words each, then you might want to go ahead and pick a program to buy - because often it helps to see it all broken down and worked through step-by-step (the Wise Owl Polysyllables a pp mentioned follows basically the same approach as ElizabethB's materials). Does that help any?

It's not so much "practice makes perfect" as it's "perfect practice makes perfect" - if you keep practicing your mistakes, then you are cementing your mistakes instead of fixing them :doh. So if it were my kiddo, I'd want to make sure her reading practice was training her in *how* to correctly distinguish between phonograms, and *how* to tackle unfamiliar words, especially multi-syllable words. As soon as she starts to make a mistake, you want to stop her and walk her through the *right* process to think through the word. Which means *you* need to know what process you are going to walk her through ;). My top criterion for determining whether I should use a formal program or instead do informal practice of what we've already learned is: do *I* know the process I want *her* to use well enough to walk her through it explicitly? If *I* can't explain what I want her to do in nice, clear, explicit steps, then that's when I pull out a formal program. Not just so *she* can learn what the program teaches, but also so that *I* can learn how to *teach* it. One benefit of well-written programs is that they teach *me* how to teach the subject. And once *I've* learned what the program is teaching, then I can apply it to *anything* they are doing - I'm ready to use that method, and walk her through the method, on *any* bit of reading material that comes our way. Looking at her particular errors, she confused b/p; my middle dd does the same (she also confuses b/d), and whenever she does, I have her make the letter with her hands (one hand for the stick, the other for the ball) - to feel which side of the stick the ball is on (for b/d) and to feel whether the ball is at the *top* or the *bottom* of the stick (for p/b). She also confused m/n (or m/nn) - you could make those letters with your hands, too. (For n, thumb pointed down, palm curving around for the hump, and other fingers pointing down. For m, do that with both hands and hold them together for two humps. For two n's side-by-side, make an 'n' with each hand and hold them with space between them.) For the wh/th confusion, I might have her walk through identifying them each and every time you come to them in her reading, *before* she even makes an attempt at reading them. "This letter is? This letter is? When they are together, they say? So the whole word is?" Wrt working through unfamiliar words, the basic process is breaking the word into syllables, and then reading it syllable by syllable. (If she isn't able to read a given syllable, then you'd break it into phonograms and walk through it phonogram by phonogram, blending them together just like you did in reading one syllable words.) Here's a pdf from All About Reading that summarizes the process: http://downloads.allaboutlearningpress.com/downloads/AAR_Blending_Procedure.pdf . Here's a video showing the same process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjBUcsVdyL8 . If you want a little more help without needing to buy a whole 'nother program, ElizabethB has free syllable division instruction and practice on her site, The Phonics Page: http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/WellTaughtPhonicsStudent.html . But instead of using letter tiles to walk through a word, you can use a notched card to uncover only one part of the word at a time (whether one syllable or one phonogram) - and it pairs nicely with walking her through distinguishing between the above letters (or any combo she often has trouble with). Reading using a notched card also helps prevent guessing (as it sounds like she did with staying/stayed - she didn't really process the ending but guessed using context clues) - it's a common way to teach kids to slow down and really focus on what's on the page phonetically. What you do is to cut a little rectangle out of a corner of the card, as tall as a single line of the book she's reading and about an inch wide. Have her slide it along as she reads, uncovering each word as she goes. If she starts to get a word wrong, stop right there and have her start at the beginning of the word and uncover each individual phonogram one-by-one, sounding out as she goes. It helps kids slow down and *pay attention* to each bit of each word, and to reinforce reading left-to-right and sounding out to decode (instead of guessing or filling in the blanks with what you expect to see). Long story short (too late ;)), I'd want to do more than just "more of the same" practice - I'd want to target the practice toward helping her learning how to correct herself. And whether that's best done with a formal phonics review, or with informal practice of phonics lessons during her reading practice (paired with phonetic spelling) depends not just on how many holes the child has in her knowledge (after a certain point, going back through a program works better than fixing individual holes ad hoc), but also a lot on how experienced the *parent* is at practicing phonics in the context of reading without a formal program. Personally, I've had to go through a formal program at least once before I felt ready to teach through informal practice. And a notched card, paired with stopping and working through trouble spots slowly and explicitly, can be a useful addition to most any practice or program.