Hello,
I'm mostly a lurker here at WTM and have gained many good tips and tricks from reading threads. This time, I have to be the one posting. I'm sure if I did a search I would come up with ideas, but I guess I would just like some thoughts specific to my child. I have a son who turned eight at the end of Dec. He is still struggling to read. He has good days and bad, but is not anywhere close to a 2nd grade reading level. We are working through All About Reading right now. We did move on to level 2 and we've started covering splitting up syllables (the short and closed syllable), and the silent e. However, reading one page in the Level 1 reader takes a long time. I've never timed it but I would guess 8 min. (at least) for one page. His reading is slow and halting. He has to sound out almost every word - even short one syllable words. When we do work on the board he can split words up and figure them out pretty quickly but when he looks at a whole page of words, it's like everything he has learned evaporates. Today he had the word "Kate" in a story and he looked at it and said, "J...J....J....J....J...." I just let him go hoping that eventually he would figure it out but finally I had to tell him to look at the first letter and tell me what it was. Then he said, "K". And I asked him why he was saying "J". He just shrugged and said that's what it looked like to him. I was soooo frustrated!
Any tips for motivating and helping a struggling reader. I'm just about at my wit's end today. In my experience, that means tomorrow will be good, but right now I'm feeling like a pretty terrible teacher. :(