Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Next step in reading?

DS4 has been trying to learn to read for a few months now and he seems right on the cusp, but just isn't making the leap. He can sound out pretty much any word that follows regular phonetic rules, he has a decent amount of sight words (some of them he only does when he isn't thinking about it) and is very interesting in doing it. I suspect that he's starting to read but just doesn't realize that he's doing it, he looks at books at night before falling asleep and the next day seems to know things from them but says it's from looking at the pictures (mostly dinosaur books). He asks me to point out words while I'm reading to him and DS6, things like "fantastic" and "thoughtful", not little words.

Is there anything else I can do to help him? He has no interest in the BOB type books, he wants to read real stories, but doesn't have the patience to sit with me and work through them. It's frustrating to watch him want this so badly and trying so hard and not know how to help him!

You can have him read the first paragraph on each page. That way he doesn't have to read too many words and doesn't get too frustrated but still gets to learn something. Even today we take turn with both DS6 and DS4. We read one page and they the other one even though DS6 usually keeps going for more than one page.

I like Reader Rabbit computer games. They seem to do a nice job in teaching sight words and phonics. May be your son would love to practice that way.

My main thought is to wonder what kind of help he'd like? At 4 I'd expect that he might have an opinion on what'd help him. Maybe if you make several suggestions and see what he likes the sound of? One thing we used to do when DS was wanting to read but suffering frustration was to read alternate sentences of a very familiar story. That way he got a lot of support from memory; and once he'd had enough of that, I'd just read the rest of the story to him. No need to push. A refrain at that point was also "I'll read it, and you tell me the words I don't know". Often, even though he could sound out words, it interrupted the flow too much and he'd rather just be able to appeal to me whenever he wanted. I went along with it, and his phonics ability is still great. So at least for my DS, following his lead has worked very well.

I was amused to see on his classroom wall a display of all the children's reasons why it was a good thing to be able to read (mostly recording why they want to learn, but it was nicely worded not to exclude those who already can). My DS's contribution was "So that when nobody wants to read you a story you can read it yourself." Now everyone thinks I'm a cruel parent who forced my child to learn to read by being unwilling to read to him :-O

He has said he wants a game on the computer to help him. The ones we've tried (starfall.com and headsprout) are too focused on learning the alphabet and the sounds the letters make, at least in the beginning and he ends up using them as passive video games instead of learning tools. Does Reader Rabbit work differently?

One thing I've been doing when we read together is having him sound out a couple of major words in the beginning of the story that repeat a lot and then stopping and letting him fill in those words whenever we come to them. It seems to help him focus on the text as I read and learn to visually track the words as they're read. And now that I type that, I'm wondering if the problem is the transition from being a passive listener to an active reader?

I think he also sees DS6 reading very fluently and thinks that's what he's supposed to be able to do.