We pulled DS5.7 out of Kinder after Thanksgiving to homeschool. He is a mathy kid but his fine motor skills (writing) and reading skills were lacking behind and he was getting increasingly frustrated. Since we're homeschooling now, we took a laid back approach to the reading / writing thing and are waiting for it to click for him. In math we're just letting him run with it (using Dreambox learning). He too is the kid that needs phonics rules. He could figure out how to read the words based on the rules but once he'd hit a word that was an exception to the rule and read it wrong, he'd get very frustrated and just give up and shut down when it comes to reading. And school was very focused on sight words. I don't push him into reading for now, I do ask him to listen / follow in text 3 books on Reading Rainbow every day and when he's playing video games and wants me to read something, I have HIM read it to me. I love to see that spark in his face when he realizes HE CAN read most of those words. But we are still trying to get over that aversion towards reading he got in the first 3 months of Kindergarten. We are planning on homeschooling year round so we don't have to rush anything.
I saw your other post explaining the whole situation in Kindergarten. I'm just curious ... wouldn't taking it slow and forgetting about the whole being behind be an option too? He WILL catch up at some point (unless there's a real LD that would prevent him from it at any age), he's still very young and reading / writing just might be too much for him for now. I just keep thinking (in general ... not just your situation) ... why do schools push kids so hard to spend so much time and energy on something when they are 5 when there's a good chance they'll learn that same thing many times faster and easier when they are a year older?
