Dancing Bears not the panacea I hoped for?

[LydiaLunches]

Don't know if anyone has any help or advice to offer?

DD (6, yr1) appeared to be behind with her reading (red band, now yellow band) so on the advice of lots of people on here (thank you ) we started 15 minutes Dancing Bears every night and are now half way through Book A with solid recognition of all the flashcards.

What has improved is her confidence and approach (she used to stare at the page for ages, then read randomly from either left or right), ability to decode words systematically (as you would hope!) and she does very little guessing if any now. But, she is still slow and stilted with very poor stamina - the yellow band books are still pitched right for home I think (they read one band ahead in guided reading).

Reading the 'last mile' thread clarified my concerns. Should I be devoting the time to reading to her perhaps? I couldn't lay my hands on the book the other day and she spotted Book B on the shelf so we did the first page of that instead, she could read all the words on it but slowly. So wondering whether it is worth persisting? Also just a bit down about how it seems that she could just be a poor reader for now, all her friends seem to be racing away from her, and not just in literacy, it is like she can't access a lot of the wider curriculum due to this holding her back.

There are other things making me obsess about it, very bright older sister (and possibly younger one too), selective education area, just being me !

[mrz]

Whether you decide to continue with Dancing Bears or not she still needs you to read to her.

[LydiaLunches]

DH, her big sister and I do read to her at bedtime, and she listens if DD3 asks for a story which is quite often, would be extra to that. It was mainly your posts that put me on to it, thank you, the improvements have been great, she could barely read at all before outside of the ORT they use at school, she was a gifted interpreter of the illustrations!

[EdgeOfNowhere]

Keep up with dancing bears.

There is no guarantee that she'll be a fluent reader at the end of dancing bears, but it sounds like its helping so far.

She's only in Y1. Very diff scenario to my last mile thread.

[LydiaLunches]

Thank you for stopping in, your thread was very interesting

[CecilyP]

She is only young and just beginning. Or course it will be slow when virtually every word will be a new word being read for the first time. Even good readers were beginners once.