Impossible to teach?

[PrincessFiona]

You have just described my daughter, lunatic. We actually had discussions with the school about holding her back a year too. So I definitely feel your pain. My daughter is now in the second grade and she continues to march to her own drummer...which is also art, btw but we have seen a great deal of improvement.

She attended summer school and at the end of it all, the teacher told me "Everyone is ready for 1st grade but Finny" Forget all of the mother guilt/expectations things that went along with that. We approached the summerschool option at that age as a great honor to be invited so we could protect her ego.

We tried hooked on phonics, but Amanda was just not interested...part of it was that she just wasn't ready, I think, and pushing it made her frustrated. I had to work very hard to keep my frustration (and fear that she wouldn't learn to read or would fail in school) from showing.

She had a great teacher for first grade....When Amanda started, she was still unsure of the letters and wrote many of them backwards. I had a conference with the teacher where I told her that I was afraid she would never learn to read. A few weeks later, Amanda came home reading her first book 8O

The teacher used a whole language approach mixed later with the sounding it out. I was not an advocate of this approach until I saw it in action. Basically, the kids memorized several easy words. They had a book where the words were written.

Example:

and the cat hat and hat cat the

etc, etc.

Each page had several words repeated over and over again. Each night, the kids had homework to read the page 3 times. When they were successfully able to 'read' that page, they went on to the next. The pages got more detailed and eventually sentences started:

The cat ate the rat.

The rat ate the hat.

etc,.....

And then before you knew it, they were reading a little story about a cat and a hat.....

The sounding it out stuff and rules came later after the children had built up their confidence and had gained some intuitive understanding of the way that the words sounded.

Amanda went from getting Title 1 help in first grade to testing at grade 3.4 reading level last week. She is now a pretyy avid reader.

Our concern now is for math. She continues to struggle at each new level. She will finally 'get' the addition only to be confounded by subtraction...and then she'll master that only to be back to square one with telling time or fractions. It is very frustrating..We've actually got her first grade teacher now as a tutor for her weekly because it became too big of an issue in the house....everyone was frustrated.

She was 'offered' summer school for her math this summer, but we declined. She will continue to work with her teacher from last year and we will do things with her at home.

There have been some concerns raised about the possiblity of dyslexia or other learning disabilities with Amanda.....perhaps her talents just lie in music and art .....

kris

PS..regarding hooked on phonics...We tried it out and I think that it is a really good program. I'd definitiely consider it.
One of the best parts of that program is a computer game where they have to identify letters and words...it is a slow progression from letter sounds to whole words and my daughter was always overjoyed when she made it to the next level.


kris

[mommax3]

Biggest question.....when is her birthday?

And when will you be moving?

I really, really believe that kids learn to read on their own timetable and if they have been given the appropriate tools (been read to, been encouraged by teachers, etc.....) there isn't a whole lot else a parent or teacher can do until the child is ready.

I know LOTS of kids (who are very smart and are in G/T classes now) who repeated kindergarten, and I think it is a great option to take a look at. Some of them switched from public to private school when they repeated, and some went from a half-day program to a full-day program the second time around.

If you want public school to be an option when you move, I would go the route of having her repeat. She also may get motivated during summer school and catch right up.

My 5 year old (who turns six May 29) has not taken to reading very quickly, either. It seems to be turning around a little here in the past few weeks, though, so I am hopeful. My oldest reads WAY above grade level and has from the start, with very little encouragement from me other than to answer his questions, so I have been feeling guilty all year about all of the things I should have/could have done to encourage my second child. However, what it comes down to is that he was NOT interested. My youngest is following the path of the oldest one and is already picking out letters and familiar words when we are out and about (off of restaurant placemats, for example) and I don't do much to encourage him....next to nothing, as a matter of fact! Something sneaky I did around spring break time was I got these LeapFrog letter magnets (for the youngest ) that go on the refrigerator....they come with this little holder and when you put a letter in there, a little song plays about the name of the letter and the sound it makes. I also got a whole bunch of Sesame Street videos having to do with letters (ostensibly for the youngest, as well) and have them playing in the background a lot. I KNOW that my five year old has been playing with the magnets and watching the videos, but I don't let on.....I just say that it is good for Nathan to start learning these things. So maybe something like that might jumpstart your daughter. I've also tried to get him playing Jump-Start Kindergarten or Jump-Start First Grade a couple times a week on the computer. My oldest liked to work on those things by himself, but my 5 year old wants to sit on my lap while he does it......of course there are tons of things I would rather be doing (or should be doing) but it is a fun way for him to do what amounts to old-fashioned drilling.

I also have invested in some of the phonics reader things that they sell in the book orders and we read those together.....I praise everything he manages to read no matter how many mistakes he makes along the way. He loves getting book order books, so that kind of takes the boring-ness out of the whole thing.

I also think (although I hesitate to post this! ) that he has finally figured out that playing his GameBoy and other video games will be a heck of a lot easier if he learns to read! I don't know if your daughter is into that, but there is an idea.

Sorry for the long post, but we have definitely been going through some of the same issues around here!

Keep us posted!

Sally

[PrincessFiona]

I also think (although I hesitate to post this! ) that he has finally figured out that playing his GameBoy and other video games will be a heck of a lot easier if he learns to read!

kris

Since my kids are younger I don't have any personal experience to offer.

I think what Kris and Sally said is right on. There has been such a push for literacy that kids who just aren't ready seem like they are "behind." A few weeks ago, I had dinner with a friend who teaches 1st grade and we were talking about this push for measurable performance so early. She said she was really surprised to learn from her mom that she (my friend) wasn't reading until the end of first grade and didn't know her letters at the beginning of first grade. I think she turned out ok since she is now teaching kids to read! She felt that some kids are more ready for certain concepts, be it math reading or whatever, at different times. Easier said in theory than when it is your kid....

Also from another teacher friend -- she thinks it is easier on kids to repeat a grade earlier than later, i.e. repeating kindergarten is easier on them than repeating first. Do you think she would be bored if she did another year of kindergarten?

[Rapunzel]

Well, I will speak from my perspective - having taught my son and eldest two daughters to read. I found that what Sally said about children learning to read on their own time-table is very true. Once my children decided they wanted to learn to read it was just a matter of me providing the rules and the opportunity to practice the rules they had learned. As a result I have one child who learned to read at the age of 6 and another who is learning now at the age of 5 and another who taught herself to read by the age of 5.

I do think there is a lot of pressure in a structured classroom for children to be at a certain level by a certain time-period. But, I hold to the theory floating around right now that reading is just as natural a "skill" as walking and talking, and that just as those skills are completely generalized and subjective as to the age at which they should be "mastered" so is reading. Because of the social aspects involved in a classroom with many students of the same age I can definitely see that a child's level of self-esteem can be profoundly affected by having a different mastery level of reading than his/her peers.

Interestingly, I personally know a woman who didn't learn to read until she was 13 (she was homeschooled and her parents are hard-core "unschoolers"). This young woman is currently attending Harvard.

So, I can understand that there is a lot of social anxiety involved with a child not reading at the same level as his/her peers. But, I also feel very strongly that being a bit "behind" in the development of reading skills isn't going to hurt a child academically.

The reading program I have used with all of my children to great success is called The Wright Skills Decodable Books. The Wright Group is a subsidiary of McGraw-Hill. The books have three levels (A, B, and C) covering 96 books total. Each book introduces one to several new phonetic rules (only one rule at a time once the rules become more difficult) building upon previous rules learned. Every book also introduces one to several new "sight words" (words that cannot be learned using phonetic rules). The books are created by a variety of authors and illustrators with bright pictures and fun stories. They proceed in a very orderly fashion and all of the words in each book can be read using the rules for that book and the previous books in the series. I sound like a salesman for the Wright Group!! But, it is a very good program.

I don't know if any of this makes you feel better or will possibly help you. But, you have my sympathies! It's things like this that make being a mom really tough!

Jennifer

We love The Wright Group books, too. I'm not sure that we have the same ones -- ours are Level I, II, and III (I think we just have level I). My aunt specializes in literacy at the early elementary level and gave us some of these books. On of her areas of interest is teaching non-fiction reading. The books we have are fiction and non-fiction. Ex: there is a non-fiction book about giraffes and then a fiction story about a giraffe. The idea is to interest children in both fiction and non-fiction reading. And to teach them "how" to read non-fiction -- looking for key words, taking in facts, etc. That way when they are reading textbooks later on, that type of reading feels familiar.
If the Decodable Books are half as good as the series we have, I think it would be a great help!

btw...I'm not trying to teach bryn to read. She found these books at my aunt's house and we brought some home. She just really enjoys the stories and facts in each book.
(lest you all think I am trying to create some sort of child genius!)

[peggyfromwastate]

My daughter Kate loved being read to, loved the sound of new words, and loved art/crafts of any type at that age. She did not love sitting down to practice writing letters, or sitting down to sound out stupid books with no plot/depth. I did not push reading at all. We didn't do any hooked on phonics or anything like that, I just read to her. For instance, when she was about 5.5 years, I started reading the Narnia series to her. She understood it and enjoyed it much more than she would have enjoyed reading through some "age appropriate" books. I was fortunate in that her KG (private) didn't push reading on the kids, and I never did either. Long story short, she started to read literally within 3 weeks (she knew her ABC's and certain "sight words" like the, at, in..., but really didn't know how to "sound out" anything) just because I think she was motivated to read Junie B Jones books on her own like some of her 1st grade friends. I actually didn't start her in 1st grade right away (long story but thank goodness in Washington state the cumpolsory age for school is 8, so I had freedom to keep her out til I felt comfortable! My parents thought I was CRAZY...) partly because I was worried they'd flip out b/c she wasn't reading, and I didn't want her to fell "stupid" or anything. My philosophy is sooo much aligned with the belief that students learn to read when they are ready to, and forcing the issue is bad... Anyway, Kate now reads at a level not even measured at the Elem School (I guess they only rate up to a 5th grade level, and she tests well above that), she still doesn't enjoy Math, but we have her doing Math made easy workbooks to grow her confidence in this area, and she still loves above all else art class. She is a stubborn girl, and I believe that had I freaked out about reading she probably wouldn't be reading today. That's just her personality...

Is the summer school mandatory? I guess I would let her go if she wanted to go, but if it's just a long tutoring session when she could be out playing and having fun... I really think the "unschoolers" approach to education up to age 8 makes a lot of sense. That tends to be how I naturally go with my kids, but it takes all kinds!