Praise for Apples and Pears and Dancing Bears

[mothergooseof4]

My 10yo has struggled with reading from day one. I used OG methods with my kids for spelling and reading, but this guy really struggled. He learned all of the phonograms in K. His spelling has always been perfect, which is probably part of the problem. He is a perfectionist. When reading, if he doesn't get it the first time he gets frustrated, and things go downhill. He can encode (spell) multisyllable words very well, breaking them down into syllables. Decoding was never as easy.

 

I have tried and tried, but nothing helped. I researched, but no LDs or vision issues seemed to fit. Last year, I let him choose books to read for school, but he would pick things like Cat in the Hat. Then we switched spelling to Apples and Pears, but teach it with our OG background. Book A was too simple, but built some skills. This year we moved on to Book B which gets into multisyllable words. We are finishing it up now. We also added Dancing Bears FastTrack. He hates every minute of it, but I have seen him grow so much. He doesn't struggle so much and breaks longer words down into their parts to decode instead of getting frustrated and giving up. He is almost done with it and will then do DB book C.

 

This is the first time he has ever read for pleasure. He is almost done with the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. He has no desire to read any other books, but it is progress. I also assign books for him to read for school now from various booklists....... SL, HOD, etc. He doesn't like to read them, but does it without complaining. I do allow him to drop one if he tries a couple of chapters and says it's too hard. I don't want him to get too frustrated.

 

While I am sure some of this is maturity, I really think the way these two programs teach has clicked with ds. Thanks to all that have recommended them here.

[WishboneDawn]

We've had a similar experience. My son couldn't read at 8. We had tried several programs and some seemed to work (100EZLessons for instance) but didn't translate to reading outside the program.

 

We started DB and A&P and he's now finished DB and is finishing up A&P C and is reading grade level books for pleasure. He's also reading ads, magazines, video game text, etc.

 

He also hates A&P. I'm getting awfully tired of it as well but it works and so I'm sticking with it (though we dropped a lot of the dictation and such since he does that in writing).

 

I can't praise DB and A&P enough.

[Shellers]

:party::party:

 

My DS12 has severe dyslexia. I pulled him from public school at the beginning of 5th grade (last year). He learned to read last year using Dancing Bears and Bear Necessities. We had to go really slow, but it worked! He's a reader!