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SWOH | Wow, thanks for the replies. I guess I should have gave a little more information. He had trouble last year also but had made great progress by the end of the school year. He was in a reading program at school all year and we worked with him a lot at home. We worked with him all summer at home and he was doing great and was doing pretty good with comprehension, also. At the beginning of this school year he was slightly lower than expected and they put him back in the reading program at school and it seems he is going backwards, I think it hurt his confidence and kind of embarrassed him.
He is very literal. He has a lot of trouble with phonics, which we are working on that a lot with him at home. He tries to sound everything out and doesn't really understand some of the common rules. He's getting a lot better with it but he often makes the comment that the way that word is spelled doesn't make any sense. He has trouble with silent letters and the ones that don't sound like they look, such as gh, ght, ph, etc. He also guesses a lot, like if the word is example he'll say excited or if the word is now he'll say new. They have him reading really easy books in his reading program at school, he reads them at school and then he's supposed to read the same book at home. My issue with this is that he memorizes them and at home he doesn't actually read them. Sometimes he is 2 pages ahead of the page we're on. The other night he was trying to figure out a word and said something that wasn't even close to that word and I couldn't figure why he thought that's what it was until we turned the page and the word he had said was the second word on that page. He knew that word was supposed to be somewhere close to that point in the book.
I don't think he's dyslexic, they tested him for it and I'm not seeing it at home. He does tend to make letter sounds out of order on certain words but not all the time. He also has a habit of putting the first letter of the the next word on the front of the word he's trying to read. He occasionally jumps lines but not very much. His vision is fine. I think it's a confidence issue more than anything. I asked him if he's embarrassed about not being able to read the same books that kids in his class are reading and he says he is. I'm trying to convince him not to be embarrassed and do the best he can. He gets really excited when he gets a word right that he's struggled with in the past, like he's relieved he finally did it. But then there's also times where he won't recognize simple sight words. He's really inconsistent. We do flash cards or his sight word lists at least 4 or 5 times a week and he's getting them down pretty good when we do the lists. But he still has trouble with those words in a book or sentence sometimes. And I don't do the words from the lists in order every time so he's not memorizing the order of the words.
He also has a slight speech impediment, so when he says a word out loud and tries to sound it out he sometimes doesn't put the right sound with the letters and this also confuses him.
We are definitely not going to ignore this. We don't pressure him a lot but he's aware of what he needs to do. We read every night and do some sight words every night and practice his spelling words every night. He seems to be able to spell pretty good which is also kind of confusing to us. We try not to over do it, between reading and sight words and spelling words it's usually about an hour a day...with a few breaks. We try to do it either in the afternoon or early evening. If it's toward late evening, like after 7:30, he gets extremely tired really fast and can't seem to stay awake while he's reading. He reads fairly easy books at home but we also have him read more difficult books also.
He is the youngest of 4 kids. Our other 3 picked up on reading fairly easily and they read all the time. We don't have to tell them to, they enjoy reading. The youngest enjoys reading also and enjoys being read to. My wife and I read a lot, it didn't occur to me until one of you said to make sure he sees us reading that she reads a lot on her Kindle and I read a lot on my lap top and maybe he doesn't know we're reading. I'll make a point to start reading actual books or magazines so he can see it.
I'm not sure I agree with what they're doing with him at school, I'm tempted to go the other way and instead of reading easier books I'm tempted to go with more difficult books and build his confidence up a little. He just seems to second guess himself a lot and I wonder if that may help him realize that he can do it.
Again thanks for the responses. I realize slow progress is still progress, but we're pretty concerned about it. | |
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2nd grader having trouble reading
