To panic or not to panic

[athena1277]

I have been stressing a lot over ds's struggles in learning to read (and posted about it a few times). In the last few weeks I have been reading Overcoming Dyslexia and scouring the internet to learn more about reading problems and how I can help him. We are nearly halfway through our school year and he is still on CVC words, although he wants to be able to read "bigger words".

 

Then after 2 weeks off due to sickness and my mom visiting for Thanksgiving, we started school this week. I started with a K reading assessment that a ps K teacher friend gave me (it's what she gives to her students). He did pretty well on the assessment. I also had him reading a bit from some Bob Books. He did really well (not perfect, but much better). Today we did a lesson in OPGTTR and he again did much better than he had been doing.

 

So now I don't know what to do! He is improving, but still has to sound out a lot of words. I'm not sure how he will do when I introduce blends, especially since he has a speech delay. He can't make most of the blend sounds yet.

 

Do I just keep going and hope he continues to "get it?" or do I look for some type of intervention program?

[Catwoman]

Don't panic! He's only 5. He might simply not be ready to read longer words yet. Many, many 5 year olds can't read a single word, so your little guy is doing just fine.

 

Really.

 

Take a deep breath, and just keep doing a bit of reading every day, and he will eventually get it. I wouldn't look into intervention for a 5yo unless there were a lot of other issues involved.

 

(I'll bet your dd was quick to learn to read, right? :) It's hard not to compare the two kids and worry if one seems to be "doing things differently" than the other one did them! )

 

:grouphug:

[Guest submarines]

Are you talking about your 5 yo? There are many countries in Europe where reading is not even taught until they are 7. I'd certainly wouldn't panic at this point. It seems like he's doing fantastic for his age.

[In the Rain]

If you are talking about your 5yo, I wouldn't worry yet. One of my dds didn't really start reading until she was 6.5. She has more than caught up, and now reads above grade level. Some 5yos (even girls LOL) just aren't ready.

[PrairieSong]

Definitely do not panic if he's only 5! Some of my kids learned to read at age 5 (one learned before 5) but two learned at 6 and one really struggled and learned veeerrryy slowly. He was at least two grade levels behind for a while. Now he is a college sophomore and doing well.

 

Kids vary widely in their readiness for reading, and in the pace they learn to read. Some of mine zipped through phonics and reading lessons and some...take much longer.

[Susan Wise Bauer]

I think he's still well within normal range for a little boy. Blends take time--don't be in a hurry to introduce them until he's sounding out three-letter words easily and fluently.

 

I've talked to a lot of moms in this situation who have a girl first and then a boy...and then they think there's something wrong with the boy. (If you do it the other way around, you just think your little girl is a GENIUS. )

 

SWB

[athena1277]

SWB relpied on my post! I feel so special!

 

You all are right that I had a girl who picked up reading quickly first. She finished OPGTTR and was reading chapter books by the end of K. Ds is half way through K and on lesson 39.

 

Besides that, I worry because he has a speech delay and I see where a lot of his reading struggles mirror his speech struggles. He's been in speech therapy for 2.5 years. He's made progress, but it's so sloooooow. I don't want him to be the 9yo who can't read if there is anything I can do to help him.

[Susan Wise Bauer]

If he's sounding out words now--even little ones--it's very unlikely he'll be the nine-year-old who can't read. And you have *four* *whole* *years* before you get to that point.

 

The advice in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a good one for all of us as we teach our kids...

 

Don't Panic.

 

SWB

[ChristusG]

Definitely do not panic right now. He's only five. I have a five year old and I don't even do school with her every day. She can sound out CVC words right now and I'm totally fine with that!

 

I do have a child who was a struggling reader. She was diagnosed with mild dyslexia. She didn't start reading until nearly 8 years old. Now she's over 8.5 and doing well! Kids learn to read at different times. No stress!

[Halftime Hope]

OP, you've gotten a lot of great advice. As the mom of two dylsexic guys, wife to another one, and DIL to a dylexic MIL, we have a lot of life experience in this area.

 

Having been through language therapy, I will tell you that slow and steady wins the race, explicitly teaching phonics and using multi-sensory repetition to engrave new pathways in the brain to the language centers.

 

You already have a head start since you are aware of what this "looks like" from your reading of Shaywitz, so take the others' advice, do what you are already doing, and keep plugging away at it. If your child turns out not to have dylsexia, he'lll have a great foundation in explicit language training, and if he does, you'll already be doing what needs to be done.

 

When my eldest was tested, he was labeled as dyslexic, partially remediated, and it only took him 9 month of LT to finish what we had already started. Youngest went through the whole language therapy program (2.5 years) as I was busy teaching the older two, was up to my eyeballs in eldercare, and had zero patience for teaching phonics and reading. (The timing varies from child to child, but the point was tht we had gotten about 75% of the work done at home.)

 

The work we did at home was before SWB's material came out, so we used "Sing Spell Read and Write" and then followed it up with a variant of the The Writing Road to Reading, written for homeschoolers. Scottish Rite congratulated me for what I had done and said my eldest was good to go, but I told them they were nuts, this child was college-bound, and I wasn't calling 6.6 grade reading level "done," for an 8th grader. So they refered me to a language therapist who specialized in GT kids, and she took it from where we had left off.

 

Moral of my story: you can do this, or a good bit of it, if he does turn out to have an LD. If he does, keep vigilant, even if he does "take off". Keep watching to see how he continues to progress over the years. A great leap may be followed by a plateau, but he needs to keep progressing until he can read fluently at college level, eventually. : )

 

Read aloud, read aloud, read aloud! As soon as he is able, have him read with you as you read aloud, so he is seeing and hearing the words. Chances are that if he is weak in language processing, he'll have compensating strengths in auditory processing or some other pathway--use that! (Both dss have tippy-top scores in vocab comprehension because of all the read alouds--thank goodness--but if I had known, I'd have had him read with me as I read. I've done that for ds2, and it had really helped!)

 

Best wishes!

[ElizabethB]

Do not panic!

 

My 7yo is on his 5th phonics program, just keep working on it. (And he has no underlying problems, he is just a normal boy!!)

 

There are things you can do to progress within the speech problem limitations. I tutored a boy with speech apraxia who could sound out 3 to 5 syllable Latin words before he could master blends.

 

So, you can skip blends for now and work on syllables and then multi-syllable words without blends. My how to tutor page has idiot proof instructions about how to teach syllables and the syllabary in the link #4 at the bottom.

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/howtotutor.html

 

You can progress from syllables to 2 syllable "easy" words like ba-ker and vi-per. (Boys like being able to read viper!). Just skip the ones with blends for now. I would use Webster's 1908 Speller with marked print, I like marked print for anyone with speech problems.

http://www.donpotter.net/pdf/websterspellingbookmethod.pdf

[Susan in TN]

Does he have trouble with numbers? How about shapes? Colors?

 

My dd6 still struggles remembering some sounds (h, w, b/d, f, j, r) and is very slow to sound out 3 letter words, but an educator friend reminded me that she really does well with shapes, colors, and numbers. She's just a little slower with reading and that's OK. She's made lots of improvement over the past 4 months!

 

I have added a lot of different things to her reading "education" than I did with my other kids - more sentence and word copying, even though she can't read the words, iPad phonics/alphabet games, in addition to Explode the Code (which she needs a lot of help with) and Phonics Pathways. It has helped to go in cycles with her - lots of phonics lessons for a couple weeks, then a couple weeks with more iPad games. I think she just needs more time to let things sink in.

 

My 8yods, while he is reading very well now, really didn't take off with reading until he was almost 7. He has an auditory processing disorder and also had speech issues.

[FairProspects]

I agree. 5 is too early to worry. At 7 if there are still problems, you can start to ask some questions. ;)

[*Lulu*]

You have already gotten some good advice; I just wanted to agree that 5 is too early to panic, especially if there were speech/language issues. I learned during a total freak out when Sister was 6 that it is NORMAL for children with speech issues to take longer to really master phonics. (This is true even after the speech issue is resolved.) IIWY, I would stay very low key until the speech issues are totally resolved, then focus on repeating the information as many times and as many ways as needed to help it stick and click.

[twoxcell]

Don't panic! He's only 5. He might simply not be ready to read longer words yet. Many, many 5 year olds can't read a single word, so your little guy is doing just fine.

:iagree:

[fairfarmhand]

I agree. 5 is too early to worry. At 7 if there are still problems, you can start to ask some questions. ;)

 

My kids love to play starfall.com, and it pretty much taught them to read. So let him play, keep working with him and RELAX!

[CalicoKat]

Starfall.com, it's free online reading games. My 5 yr old just wasn't getting blending sounds on her own. She's spent a good bit of time the last month "playing" games. I pulled her over to her school books to see if there'd been progress and it's working.

 

PLUS all the time I get with the others while she's distracted with the screen. . . .

[elfgivas]

I'd also suggest the book: The Gift of Dyslexia. i'm sort of startled that so many are suggesting just doing more phonics and reading work. The Gift of Dyslexia will talk you thru a lot of stuff, but what tends to work is a multi-sensory approach, and helping them learn to intentionally center their point of reference (which can actually be fun and doesn't involve letters at all). even with all the special ed teaching i've done, dyslexia was a challenge.

 

So with dd, we made letters out of our bodies, we had giant cardboard letters that we glued objects to that began with that sound, we drew letters in whipping cream, etc, etc. We sang, we danced, and we repeated each lesson twice. The tipping point for us came when dd learned sign language. it turns out her body always knows which letters and numbers are which. and i signed left handed so that when i finger-spelled, the "d" would look the way it does on the written page. she signed right-handed, so the "d" looked the same way it does on the page to her.

 

from a curriculum viewpoint, we found AVKO spelling helped her learn phonemes, and that "teach your children to read well" helped reinforce sounds, and was fabulous for fluency. you are a year away from that at least i would guess.

 

or (please don't!) you could do what dh's parents did, and pay him so much a page to read, and have him be unable to read well in high school.... where he took a year off, taught himself to center his point of reference (an unintended consequence to working for new zealand's wildlife folks, catching tuatare and sea turtles for banding), went back to school for two years, and then was accepted at stanford. sigh....

 

he's lucky to have you!

ann

[ChrisN in NY]

My youngest is now 13, but when he was 5, he was NOT ready to learn to read. At all. I scoured the internet, spent HOURS researching reading readiness activities (not early reading activities). He already knew the names of the letters, and we'd be getting to letter sounds when he was ready. I wanted something for in between. FINALLY, I discovered that mazes and dot-to-dots are good brain building activities to increase reading readiness. Life was a little crazy, so we didn't begin phonics (Writing Road to Reading) until the second half of first grade, and he was reading "easy readers" from the library before the school year was over. HTH!

[PeterPan]

I haven't read your whole thread, but this dc is *5*? And you're freaking out cuz he's not reading books in December? One, he's a boy, and boys are 6 months behind on a lot of things (known fact). Two, he's 5, which means he could be a young 5. Three, it's December. I worked in K5 all through college, and the kids were about the same place as your boy at this time of year. By the end of the year they were going through word family strips. In the local schools they hand them a list of 100 words to memorize. So by typical standards he's on track.

 

For a reality check, my dd didn't read ANYTHING till February of K5. She couldn't/wouldn't sound out AT ALL. Turned out she had some vision issues (that we didn't identify till 5th grade, grr), etc. Nevertheless, she reads JUST FINE. In fact, her reading scores are through the roof now, age 30+ on all the tests we've done with her.

 

So whether your dc is reading in December of K5 tells you NOTHING. It certainly doesn't mean he has dyslexia. Sure get his eyes checked, simply because it's a good thing to do. I took my ds4 this week. I use a developmental optometrist, because during the regular exam they *screen* for the extra things that can affect school work and reading. Doesn't cost any more but gives me more info. You find them through COVD. But really, reading comes when it comes. Don't freak out too much. :)

[theYoungerMrsWarde]

Starfall.com and Leapfrog videos and LeapFrog Word Builder. It takes the pressure of learning off and gives good review to build confidence and fluency.

[ByGrace3]

You have had great advice, but I just wanted to add to the don't panic voices. I have a 5yo ds and honestly I am thrilled that he is reading CVC words right now. At the beginning of the school year I was uncertain he would reach this point by now. I also had a dd that learned to read more easily, and it is a challenge not to compare. Numerous times a day I tell myself "he is five . . . And he is a BOY." ;)

[flyingiguana]

I had one start reading at 5, the other not til 6-1/2. The one who waited managed to get to a "6th grade level" when she was tested at 6-7/8 (in first grade) by the ps. And both now read way better than average. I don't think there's really any advantage, in the long haul, to reading early. Nor does it really predict anything about intelligence. It's just something that some kids do. And others don't.

 

BTW -- the one who started at 5 couldn't read anything in regular print size until she was about 6-1/2 or 7. She could, however, read smaller print with reading glasses that we happened to have around the house. I think a lot of kids this age tend to be a bit far sighted, but most outgrow it. It makes reading really difficult and I suspect this may be a reason many kids don't bother to start reading early. (I certainly wouldn't try to get a kid glasses, though, unless it was really obvious there was a major problem. We only tried the reading glasses out of curiosity. Truth was, my daughter would rather have been running around playing than reading. And that was probably what she "should" have been doing at that age anyway.)

 

I wouldn't worry. There are plenty of other things kids can spend time on during that year. And if there are actually problems, you'll have time to find them.