Thank you for the info and support, TwinkleToes. It is greatly appreciated. So far we've talked to the local school district only at a pre-K information session.
Regarding reading, I used some specific techniques that are a hodgepodge of things I've read and things I thought of on my own, including:
* Sounding-out techniques, including encouraging him to bridge the sounds more and more instead of uttering them discretely, and to notice common letter combinations
* Hunting for small sight words like "and", "the" in pages to improve scanning and comprehension of sentence structure
* Using flash cards (the "Phonics Made Easy" flash cards by School Zone were helpful)
* Using letter tiles to teach different words with the same phonemes together, and playing a word morph game by changing single letters at a time
* Noting with interest oddities of words we were reading, and/or similarities to other words we knew
* Sending him on a scavenger hunt for a specific word, to find it in any book in the house
* Closing a book temporarily and asking him to spell a word for me that is somewhere in the page just read
* Inflection practice
* Doing drills such as speeding through a book just read, to improve recall in general and of context, which increased his confidence in reading the books himself
* Finding small contextual things in the text to remember. For instance, he always looked forward to "Big Dog, Little Dog" for the chance to utter the phrase "Fred got wet butt" (which occurs as "Fred got wet, but" in the text)
* Having him read subtitles on some movies, when they came up
* Whenever he finished a book, I'd get him a new one. This is a bit tricky because he already had a bunch of books, most of which on a particular day would sit on his bookshelves, but I'd take special care to find an especially exciting book for reward purposes.
His book progression has included P.D. Eastman and similar stuff early on, and later on stories such as the Otto and Uncle Tooth books (which I can't recommend enough), and at present he is enjoying a bunch of DK books as well as Tintin, Carl Barks duck comics, etc. He loves a good adventure, and learning about how things work.
I have a high opinion of some of the Step Into Reading types of level readers, but they are hit and miss; some are awful. The good thing is that they are cheap, and sometimes you can find a copy to look at locally before you buy. For early reading they were helpful.
I'm not sure about the best approach with your daughter. If she is touchy about reading, it may be that she is not sure of herself yet and wants to reveal her skill when she is. I just don't know what would cause that in your situation, or if it's just a personality quirk. I would try to make small games out of reading to get her to open up, I guess. Keep it light, playful, and without any possible downsides. When she wants to quit, quit.
Another thing to try is self-teaching tools. I have a low opinion of a lot of LeapFrog toys, but at one point my son used Fridge Phonics. Now, I actually hate some features of those products; for example, in ours they only have two slots for sounds made by a particular letter. But for double-checking things on his own, they were helpful. The only problem is that no self-teaching toy I'm aware of may be good for your daughter's current level. That's too bad, as a correct one would be easy to develop in my opinion.
Incidentally, I think that intellectual courage is one of the most important things to teach and encourage-- right up there with honesty and kindness, or almost. But that is a big topic and I'm not so sure that I can give specific advice about your situation. I just know what has worked with my son.
Last edited by Iucounu; 06/03/10 05:17 AM.
