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We are currently afterschooling daily for reading remediation for DS5. We will continue during the summer to beef up reading and writing. My hope is next year the afterschooling will be for enrichment. School offers a 30 min daily pull out which we are just now learning about and haven't started yet.

I'm curious why you may have decided on "just" afterschooling for your DC? Was it lack of other options? DC liked his/her school and it was "ok" so you wanted him/her to stay in school? Inability to homeschool? Other? What time do you and DC devote to it daily?

For now, K was academically challenging for DS. He was behind when we started, has worked hard to catch up, but the program is wacky for reading (I feel they're easily reading on a 1st+ grade level). Honestly, I think he wouldn't have been behind if they actually taught phonics in school, but that's JMO. He quickly picks up on the rules of phonics, but I'm the only one teaching him that.

But math I feel he hasn't learned anything in this year or has been challenged. Since our focus has been on reading remediation, I have limited the afterschool math focus. I don't want DS studying hours every day after school. Just with reading we tend to do 30-60 min daily, which I feel is a lot for K! DS doesn't exactly enjoy our afterschooling because it's a "lot of work", but I'm hopeful focusing on enrichment will be easier and more fun for him.

If we catch up well in reading/writing over the summer and can switch focus to math/science or other enrichments I think afterschooling may work. But I find it's difficult to include remediation and enrichment unless I alternate days or something.

Do you like afterschooling for enrichment or did you end up doing a different course? Did you feel you were teaching what the school should have been? Did your child resist doing a lot of work after being in school all day?

Any general experiences would be helpful, but especially geared for younger elementary with intensive parent support.

You're not wrong about the phonics. The research is absolutely clear on this point. While some kids can learn with just a whole-word method, most need a grounding in phonics to be successful readers. (That doesn't exclude also teaching common words with irregular spellings as sight words.)

I'm kinda shocked that your school is not using phonics. No wait, I'm not.

Both my kids are good at math. They did for awhile Singapore math workbooks after school. At one point, I remember that my younger son was in kindy or first grade, and although he is a very good reader, he had trouble reading the math questions in the Singapore math book well enough to understand them to do.
We abandoned that for awhile until his reading improved enough to understand the questions.
Your child is only 5, which is very young. If you can instill in him a love of reading, that is probably all you need at this early point.

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?

Do you read at bedtime? Both of my kids love books and reading because we read to them every night. When reading began, I used BOB books and when reading, pointed at sight words in books to have them figure out the next word. Once they could read, we had them read books like Dr. Suess Hop on Pop or One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. Phonics is really important to reading!

As for amount of time afterschooling, DS6 is now in 1st Grade. The school requires daily homework, but we have permission to determine what that homework is. We probably spend 30-45 minutes a day. My son is a slow writer, so whenever the work has a lot of writing it takes longer. We only do 1-2 topics, like a math day and then a spelling and reading comprehension day. We do the Brain Quest Workbooks which makes it easy to choose by subject. IMO, I think it is important to cover multiple subjects, things the child is good at and some they aren't. Focus more on what they are good at then what they aren't though, because if it isn't required, then it should be fun to do.

We afterschooled because there were no other options where we lived. I hated it as an option because I strongly believe kids should spend a significant portion of time in unstructured play, which we had to steal from to actually teach our child. School took a massive six hour chunk out of the day which was not only pointless, but caused stress (boredom is very stressful) and that spilled over into our home life. There was also so little physical activity at school that there was no way we could afterschool on weekdays.

Had we not been able to move, I think we would have tried me going back to work and hiring a tutor to homeschool. School was worse than neutral for us.

We didn't afterschool at all with respect to academics in early elementary. I was frustrated (personally) that ds wasn't given challenging work at school, but at the same time I didn't feel any need to teach academics at home either. Instead we read a lot to ds (even after he had started reading and was light years ahead of grade level), and we followed his lead re the things he was interested in (science - he loved visiting our science center, watching Nova/etc videos, things like that).


I went back and re-read a few of your earlier posts, because I was confused by what was going on here re reading in your ds' class - but I think I understand after looking back at your earlier posts. I agree with you that the method they are using to teach reading might be incredibly frustrating for a lot of children. I wonder if part of the issue here isn't simply this year's teacher and her approach to teaching/testing etc? Whether it's just this one teacher or an issue with the school system you're in, I imagine your ds is extremely frustrated at this point, so honestly, If it were my ds I'd probably *not* worry about afterschooling, other than what I absolutely had to do to appease the school and make sure he wasn't held back for a year (which I only mention because it was mentioned in your earlier post).

One question I have - when you mentioned you feel that your ds' K class is reading on a 1+ grade level - does that mean early first grade level or end of first grade level or 2nd grade level? I think how much focus I put on spending time trying to help my child read at home would depend on where that bar is - because honestly, the difference between close-to-end-of-K and 1st-grade-beginning-of-the-year isn't much, and you might find that if you just left your ds alone he would get there on his own over the summer.

If it seems like your ds is continuing to struggle with learning to read, I'd also consider that it may be something going on that hasn't shown up on testing yet due to age or compensating with is other abilities. One of my children did struggle to learn to read and it took quite a few years (into 4th grade) before we really understood what was going on with her reading challenge. Once we did, it was *much* easier to find a program that worked to help her develop fluency etc. When I tried helping her on my own, pre-diagnosis, nothing ever really clicked. I realize (from reading the earlier posts) that you've already had your ds tested with a psych eval, but also think you noted that there was dyslexia in your family, so just wanted to throw it out there that it might be too early to really tease out if there is truly a reading challenge or not.


I agree - I think 30-60 min is a lot for a student in K... when our kids were in elementary school the guideline for after-school work was 10 minutes per day per grade.. starting in first grade, plus 20 minutes per day of reading (which could be all or part parents reading *to* their child). Our school staff has always maintained that the best way to help your child become a good reader is to read to them, even after they've started reading.


I'd try to remember life is not a race. Try to remember that some of the after-schooling and subject acceleration etc that you read about on these forums is happening because the *child* is chasing it, not the parent. When we did afterschool, it was child-led. If our children had not been happy about it or eager to do it, or if they resisted, I would not have pursued it at all.

I also suspect that if my children had been in the type of school environment you've described, with a ton of focus on levels and testing, they would have been stressed out by school and wouldn't have wanted to afterschool, even if it was completely different and fun etc. When they were in K-1 they came home from their mostly non-stressful school situations tired and hungry every day and really needed a break. Now that they are older and have their own goals, they do some of their own after-schooling after finishing their homework at night... but they still need that after-school break. The difference now that they are older and self-motivated to do the after-schooling is that they will return to it and happily do it. When they were little, once they'd come home from school and had their much-needed after-school break, it was a lot tougher to expect to get them back onto an academic task.

So I suppose my advice is, if your ds is resisting, give the academics a break for now and find some fun activities that he enjoys that may spur his imagination. Continue helping him with reading if it's absolutely necessary for school, but if not, consider giving him a break and just reading to him through the end of the school year and early summer, then see where he's at developmentally re being ready to really learn how to read.

Best wishes,

polarbear

HAHA -->

So sad. I mean, you can memorize "look" as a sight word, but isn't it just easier to know what "oo" says in that instance vs. another? DS5 already understands this logically but doesn't know the rules so it's all guesswork. And I'm looking for phonics instruction for remediation geared toward much older kids/grades because they're just doing this so young, but in the wrong way (IMO). Good for a challenge, but makes me really wonder about the other students too. Another downside I complain about is DS's habit of guessing. Even CVC words he just will guess at randomly instead of sounding it out because I'm sure that's what they're emphasizing. I sometimes want to put an audio recorder in DS's backpack to really hear what they're teaching. Maybe they are doing this and DS isn't getting the rules at school?

Thank you for your experience. It's a great question we've been debating with. I would love to homeschool and we did briefly due to multiple moves at the beginning of the year. Our long term goal was always public school. I LOVED school as a student from day one until now and DH and I wanted that experience for our DC. Our HS was very unsuccessful, I think for many reasons. But now we are gun-shy to try again, though honestly I'd love to and think for a lot of students with asynchronous learning it's maybe the best option. I'm going to treat summer as more of a homeschool trial and see what happens. Regardless, I want him to be much more comfortable with the required reading/writing expected in the (likely) case he'll continue to the G/T program at public school.

The schools are competitive where we live. I think it's a mixed bag. I certainly don't want DS to burn out or dislike school. He used to hate it, but now his opinion is generally positive (as his reading has improved I think it's gotten easier for him). I'd also like him to have some challenges too. That's why I'm debating afterschool in general. For a subject he loves (all things science), we could do projects, read books, watch educational shows, etc all day long and I know DS would love it. And I'm hoping that's what I could focus on as far as afterschool, just science enrichment.

But if his reading is behind, we will do remediation. My other debate is if math in school is really not keeping up with his knowledge and he gets bored, do we do that as well?

ITA with reading at this young age and allowing them to mature, and the only reason we're playing this game with the school system is because I certainly don't want him held back (which was explained as a possibility in DS's case if his reading didn't improve). Because how would retention really help? I think it's part of the school testing domino effect. I think that spreading more advanced phonics over the summer DS will jump ahead or at least be a stronger reader and I'm hopeful we'll keep ahead of their requirements. I'm also thinking ahead of spelling as it seems like spelling seems to be left behind these days too.

We do reading aloud all the time, it seems. I read aloud during snack times, DH reads at bedtime, and DS reads when we practice. I have him practice one or two easy readers per day.

I think that's a better balance to switch up topics. I think because the school is so focused on reading then I have too. I like the BOB books, and Nora Gaydos. I need to get some of the easy Dr. Seuss books out, but DS has most of those memorized so it wouldn't be reading per say.

Our afterschool used to be computer game based (reading eggs, dreambox, etc), but is now more mom interactive because I felt the reading eggs was so random and we needed to start covering some specific phonics topics immediately. Dream box he liked but got a little hard with the fast number recognition so we stopped for a while but may start over the summer. He also really likes little tablet math games (addition for knights or monsters, etc), so I don't think I'll count that toward our time.