DD3.3 has been spelling words for a while now and can spell difficult and long words like oatmeal and Elizabeth( her best friend's name). She has no problem spelling any word phonetically. However, she can't read- not even the words she can spell. How is this possible? She recognizes and writes both upper and lowercase letters so I know that is not the barrier. It seems as if she can translate sounds into letters but not the other way round. Any ideas and suggestions on how to get her to read?
I'd suggest not pressing her; she will when she's ready.
I think sometimes it can be scary to learn to do new things, especially if you have some awareness that they are things older children do. Sometimes our children need to be their chronological age or even younger, even though they "can" do things older children do. It seems best to me, and it seems to work with my DS, to let them drive, as it were.
FWIW, my DS had a phase at 2 of being absolutely obsessed with spelling, maybe for 6 months or so. He'd spell for fun all the time and would constantly ask me how to spell words. I don't remember exactly how it went, but I have a couple of landmarks that mean that there can have been at most 3 weeks or so between the end of that phase and the first time he picked up an unfamiliar book and read it end to end. (Before that he could read, actually, but he didn't quite own that skill, somehow.) So I don't know quite what was going on, but maybe it was something like that the spelling phase gave him confidence that he really had cracked the code?
