At three going on four, my DD, now 5.4 years old, was at a similar place in terms of reading as your DD. She knew all of the letter sounds, could sound out CVC words and was excellent with environmental print - she could "read" every store sign and knew what every logo meant. We hadn't given her any formal reading instruction at that point other than to let her play on Star fall site for a short time and read bed time stories.
Despite having all of these tools/knowledge at her disposal, she wasn't able to read a completely new book that was placed in front of her. She would "read" books to me all of the time that she must have memorized just from hearing me read them to her. I remember thinking, hmmm she's got all of the tools I wonder why she isn't making the leap to being able to decode words and read new books that contain the same vocab and are at the same level.
The turning point for her was when she started learning/figuring out sight/high frequency words. Her being able to read them gave her such a confidence boost. These words appear so often,(and are sometimes not pronounced in the most common phonetic way) that it made her feel like she could read fluently - she didn't have to try and sound out or ask for help with every word. This gave her the motivation to try sounding out the content words since reading every word didn't feel like such an up hill battle anymore.
I think I began by pointing out the word "the". Throughout the day whenever she saw that word she would say hey mom that says, "the". Sometimes if I was reading a novel and she was around I'd ask her to look at my book with me and point out the word "the" on the page. I did this with a couple of other high frequency words and she also started figuring out some of them herself. She started picking up these words more rapidly and after she'd mastered a good handful of them I noticed that her reading ability really took off.
I would try introducing some high frequency words to her, maybe one or two a day (I have a kid who only likes to listen to 2/3 of my instructions too) and see if that helps her. You can tell her to let you know whenever she see's those words during the day and make it into a game.
She sounds like she's almost there! Perhaps the high frequency words will help her reach that critical mass.
Good Luck!
ETA: I wanted to add, does she make up her own stories? DD used to tell me stories and I'd write them down for her, or she would make picture books/cards. We both had a lot of fun with those and I feel it helped her a lot with learning to read.
Last edited by eyreapparent; 11/03/14 10:33 AM.
