Difficulty learning to read

[Guest LKL]

So, my dd turned 7 in January. I have been actively teaching reading for over a year now and we're not making much progress. She knows the sounds of the letters and she knows some combination sounds (ch, sh, th, ing). When I ask her to sound out 3 and 4 letter words she can do it. But she hates, hates, hates it. After a few words she's almost crying with frustration.

Because she seemed to hate phonics so much, I laid off it for awhile, as she seemed to have the basic sounds down pat. We moved on to pre-Level 1 readers and now to Level 1 readers. She's doing a lot of memorization with these but I felt that was OK as she does look at the words as she reads and self-corrects. But now she doesn't want to sound out any words at all. She says she just wants to "know" them. And while she's picked up a fair number of sight words it's nowhere near the full list for grade 1.

I should mention that we read A LOT around here. She is usually read aloud to on average 2 hours/day. She also listens to books on tape. We've read a lot of classics (Little Men, Little Women, Jo's Boys, Little House series, Lassie, Betsy-Tacy series, Heidi, etc., etc.) She describes herself as a bookworm and reading is her favorite activity by far.

Any suggestions for what might be going on? I am getting a lot of "concern" from my mum about her being behind her peers and I am quite concerned myself. I just don't understand why she's not picking it up.

We started in with the Phonics Game today (I don't know if it's still around. My sister used it with her daughter 12 years ago when she was having difficulty learning to read). She grudgingly played one game but really pushed back on playing another.

I am torn between my worry that she'll learn to dread and hate reading if I push it too much and my worry that if I let it go too long she'll have long-term difficulties with learning to read.

Anyone BTDT? Any suggestions for techniques I might use? Any idea what might be the issue?

[LauraQ]

She is supposed to be memorizing words by sight, even if she gets there by way of phonics. You see, that's how we proficient readers do it--we read by sight, not by sounding out every word. The problem is that some educators once figured that out, and decided that since that was the end-goal (it IS the end-goal of ALL reading teaching methods) that all that messy phonics sounding-out nonsense could be skipped altogether, and even little kids could skip strait to the memorization of whole words stage from the outset.

 

So your daughter is *able* to sound out words. Great! And she is also now memorizing the more familiar/frequently repeated/common words so that her reading speed is increasing. Also great! That's the ultimate goal of phonics teaching! Instant sight-reading! (That's the point of all that reading practice--it's the drill that makes fast reading possible). The problem is that she now hates all forms of sounding out. No sweat--she only has to do it now when she meets a new word, and that will happen less and less often over time.

 

For now, let her read huge volumes of stuff that is so easy for her it requries little or even NO sounding out, that is filled end to end with words she can read by sight now that she's memorized them. Have her spend only a tiny portion of her total reading time (5 min a day is plenty!!) reading harder stuff that requires her to actually sound stuff out sometimes (but not 5 minutes of nothing but sounding out--can you imagine? It would be like asking *you* to spend 5 minutes a day reading the last 10 ingredients on food containers! LOL! What a drag!). Supplement with phonics stuff that requires careful attention to words (to help train them to be careful about too-similar words) and requires some small amount of sounding out, like Explode the Code books. Just don't tell her it's phonics or sounding out practice, and she may not notice.

[Jann in TX]

My oldest dd started reading in 2nd grade.

My middle dd knew sounds and simple blends/3-4 letter words in K--but was NOT reading fluently until 4th grade.

 

My middle dd is a high school HONORS student--late reading did not hold her back--mainly because I read GOOD STUFF to her--and she developed great comprehension skills that allowed her to take off once the rest of her brain was ready!

 

My middle dd also had vision issues--she had tested 'normal' in K--but was close to LEGALLY BLIND on a more detailed exam (Opthamologist instead of Optometrist)... it is still physically PAINFUL for her to read--but she does it when she has too--and does it well! (but you would NEVER find her reading a book for pleasure except on rare occasions...books on tape are wonderful!!)

 

Keep at it--but try not to frustrate her... also make absolutely sure that there are no other physical problems keeping her back (I have way too much guilt...).

[Guest]

It is really hard to feel that your child is not learning on schedule; but remember that schedules are generalizations or abstractions, not decrees. There are huge numbers of kids who learn to read at eight, or ten, or even twelve. Their parents panic right up to the day it clicks, and within a week the older kids are reading chapter books or even full-length adult books. Our culture has made us worry that seven is "late," but many countries only begin formal reading instruction at age seven. In the overall scheme of things, if we can remove ourselves just a bit from our country's obsession with faster=better, your daughter is still very young and has lots of time to learn to read.

 

You are working steadily, your daughter is learning; she just hasn't gotten to the "click" moment yet. If she's getting really frustrated or even trying to avoid reading, maybe think about switching more to a games/play mode for a bit. Peggy Kaye's Games For Reading are wonderful ways to continue phonics work and have a little bit of fun with the process of learning to read in a way that takes some of the frustration and pressure off.

 

My daughter also made a clear distinction between not wanting to have to figure out words in storybooks -- her treasures; don't get between her and what happens next! -- and being willing to do that kind of work when we were out and about, on store and road signs, cartons and labels in stores, newspaper headlines, etc. Experiment a bit and see if there is a realm of print outside of books that your daughter might be less frustrated with -- signs and labels don't require extended reading effort because they are short and to the point, so you can get in lots of practice with a variety of signs over the course of a day without fatigue or strain.

[OrganicAnn]

Have to check out her eyes? Tracking. Nearsighted.

 

Any signs of dyslexia?

[jeswa]

My son was a late reader so I understand where you are coming from. He really liked playing games. We played phonics bingo and also word bingo. We also played phonics concentration and he was only allowed to keep the match if he could tell me what the sound was. For the games I would always have a mix of phonics from easy to difficult with most being in between. Word building also seemed to work well for us.

 

Another thought is taking breaks from phonics. My son always seemed to improve his reading when we would take short breaks, like a week or so.

 

Have you tried www.progressivephonics.com ? It is a free site that offers readers that my 6 year old daughter is getting into. The readers have the parents read some of the words and the child reads the others. My daughter likes doing this much better than our regular phonics.

 

Good luck,

Jes

[wapiti]

I second the suggestion to rule out vision issues. www.covd.org

[Ellie]

It would also be helpful if we knew what you've been using up until now to teach her to read.

 

Of course it would be a good idea to have her vision checked, but until that happens, my advice would be to lay off the whole reading thing for awhile.

[Dobela]

I second the suggestion to rule out vision issues. www.covd.org

I third it. That website's Signs and Symptoms helped me understand that my son's reading issues were not behavioral - they were because his eyes weren't tracking together consistently and he did not have 3D vision creating depth problems. He supposedly had 20/20 vision according to the optometrist and the opthamologist. He also loved being read to and had high comprehension of what was read to him.

[LizzyBee]

There is a great list of signs and symptoms of dyslexia on this website - http://www.dys-add.com. Looking at the list might give you a better idea of whether to be concerned or not.

[Guest LKL]

Thank you all so much for your suggestions.

 

I checked out the dyslexia website and those symptoms don't really seem to fit. Ditto with the vision. I've had her vision checked twice. But I will keep that in mind and take her back for specific testing if things don't improve.

 

"For now, let her read huge volumes of stuff that is so easy for her it requries little or even NO sounding out, that is filled end to end with words she can read by sight now that she's memorized them. Have her spend only a tiny portion of her total reading time (5 min a day is plenty!!) reading harder stuff that requires her to actually sound stuff out sometimes"

 

This really hit home with me. I think I've been so concerned about getting her up to grade level that I've been moving forward before she's ready. I'm getting a lot of flack from my mom about how she's reading and there are SO MANY posts about kids who learned to read by themselves at 3, 4, 5, etc. It's very discouraging.

 

Anyway, we are starting back at the beginning with Progressive Phonics. Of course she can sound out CVC words but I figure it can't hurt to go over these again. And I'm going to let her read a bunch of Pre K/K readers (as lately I've been working with her on Level 2 readers that I'm sure must be overwhelming for her).

 

The problem I'm already seeing though, of course, is her attitude. She really hates this stuff. She'll read a couple of pages (with her only reading the CVC words and me reading all the rest) and then she'll start to whine and say she doesn't want to do it. I'm trying to hold her to it a bit more but I find it really difficult to push her mostly because I'm worried about turning her off reading forever.

 

BTW, we've tried Reading Eggs and starfall.com. She doesn't want to do either of these now (she's not really interested in the computer). All she really wants to do is play, play, play and listen to stories! Make-believe, imagination play, role-playing, telling herself stories and having me read to her. That's her focus right now and has been for years. Dislikes puzzles, board games, computer time, anything that smacks of school in any way.

 

But, she asked me in all seriousness yesterday if she could try grade 2 at the school next year. :confused:

[Ottakee]

The I See Sam books are a great program for struggling readers. They provide LOTS of practice with each new word/sound and have some really cute stories.

 

http://www.iseesam.com or http://www.3rsplus.com http://www.teacherweb.com/CA/PomeloDriveElementary/Mrssakamoto/printap2.stm is a place you can get the first 2 sets to print out.

 

Check on the Learning Challenges board for more information on this program. It is what finally got my girls reading. It will take her through a solid 3rd grade level.

[choirfarm]

When I ask her to sound out 3 and 4 letter words she can do it. But she hates, hates, hates it. After a few words she's almost crying with frustration.

?

 

That sounds EXACTLY like my daughter last year. If I gave her an individual word, she could read it. She could read a word, BUT when it went into a sentence she would be crying and missing or substituting words. Her vision was perfect when I had taken her a couple of months earlier. I took her to my eye doctor and he does vision therapy. He did a long series of tests, some of which consited of hooking up things to her head that could measure exactly where her eyes were looking. She didn't track left ot right at all. She tended to start in the middle of a page, which is why she did well looking at a single word. Even following a pen and she had to do something with her eyes until she could only see one or something and she couldn't do it. Also, she got fatigued REALLY easily. Her reading would get worse and worse the longer she did it and the more she would cry. She had only been doing the therapy a few months when she took the SAT 10. Her word reading skill was in the 70th percentile or so, but her sentence was 30 percent. (And she had already improved a lot just with the therapy she had, so who knows what it was before.)

 

They did all kinds of things with her for the past 14 months or so. We did computerized perceptual therapy. She did Brainware Safari. She did Dynamic reader this fall as a 2nd grader. You are supposed to do 3 stories each time and even though she was on the 1st grade story, we had to do one only because it took her 30 minutes to read each story and answer the questions. It was horrible. It took us an hour and a half to do it the first week and I had to call, so they changed it to one story. Then she got to two stories. We persevered. I had a kit of things we did together at home. We did the vision therapy. I kept going slowly with the phonics and just read to her and tried not to worry. I really did, but it was really hard... How much do I push?? Is she crying out of frustration or laziness ( I believe it was a little of both.) I prayed and prayed.

 

This child went from cryingand hating reading to last week checking out 10 Cam Jansen books and having read 4 of them the next day. She is blazing through books and begging to go to the library. It is amazing. So you really might look at visual processing. It is totally different from just vision exams.

 

Christine

[kathkath]

She is supposed to be memorizing words by sight, even if she gets there by way of phonics. You see, that's how we proficient readers do it--we read by sight, not by sounding out every word. The problem is that some educators once figured that out, and decided that since that was the end-goal (it IS the end-goal of ALL reading teaching methods) that all that messy phonics sounding-out nonsense could be skipped altogether, and even little kids could skip strait to the memorization of whole words stage from the outset.

 

So your daughter is *able* to sound out words. Great! And she is also now memorizing the more familiar/frequently repeated/common words so that her reading speed is increasing. Also great! That's the ultimate goal of phonics teaching! Instant sight-reading! (That's the point of all that reading practice--it's the drill that makes fast reading possible). The problem is that she now hates all forms of sounding out. No sweat--she only has to do it now when she meets a new word, and that will happen less and less often over time.

 

For now, let her read huge volumes of stuff that is so easy for her it requries little or even NO sounding out, that is filled end to end with words she can read by sight now that she's memorized them. Have her spend only a tiny portion of her total reading time (5 min a day is plenty!!) reading harder stuff that requires her to actually sound stuff out sometimes (but not 5 minutes of nothing but sounding out--can you imagine? It would be like asking *you* to spend 5 minutes a day reading the last 10 ingredients on food containers! LOL! What a drag!). Supplement with phonics stuff that requires careful attention to words (to help train them to be careful about too-similar words) and requires some small amount of sounding out, like Explode the Code books. Just don't tell her it's phonics or sounding out practice, and she may not notice.

 

great advice

[choirfarm]

My daughter also loves to play, play, play. She would spend hours listening to radio theater, books on tape in her room. She loves to be read to. Even now, I unschool a little with her. I do a certain amount of school, but then I follow her interest for the days. She is going to violin camp this year and so she made a violin notebook. She drew pictures, wrote out the parts, made a diary to keep track of her experiences, etc. She loves making cookie maps for history. She writes letters to friends (which I then copy and count for writing.) I still do dictation a couple of times a week and copywork if she hasn't come up with something, but many times other than the phonics and math, she comes up with totally cool things I can count for school..at least for 2nd grade. She used to go to sleep with her cd player on...Now she reads books. She read 2 Magic Tree Houses last night... It is just amazing. She cried so hard last year and it was so frustrating for her.

 

Christine

[fairfarmhand]

It's ok. I felt the same way last year with my dd 8. Around the middle of second grade she finally had something click in her head. SHE WAS ALMOST 8 YEARS OLD! I was so relieved. Each child is different. Let her read easy stuff. Let her read shopping lists, write funny things on the pavement in chalk for her to read, take turns reading sentences in the hard stuff with you. My dd LOVED the I spy series of books and I tricked her into reading them while I was driving. "mommy's driving; can you try to sound it out?"

 

It made it worse since her older sister taught herself to read at age 4! I know it is harder on you since you have people commenting to you about it. WHO CARES WHAT YOUR MOTHER THINKS? Hang in there!

 

She probably hates it so much because it is SO HARD for her.

[Pam L in Mid Tenn]

I also vote for having vision checked. When my son was nine we discovered a vision problem. Within days after getting glasses his reading ability "magically" jumped !

 

Also, with my second child, I began teaching a combination of phonics and sight reading techniques. I didn't make the child sound out every single sound in every single word.

[wapiti]

So you really might look at visual processing. It is totally different from just vision exams.

 

Christine

:iagree: Just something to keep in mind. It is not a regular vision checkup, and an opthamologist may not find it (which was the case with our dd - she had a perfect checkup with a pediatric opthamologist right before we found out about her problem). To really rule it out, you'd need to see a specific type of optometrist (I think I posted the link above, but in case I didn't, it's www.covd.org )