AIBU to seek extra support for my son’s phonics difficulties?

I have a son who is quite resistant to reading because it makes him anxious.

as horrible as it sounds, I never let him off because otherwise we would never restart. I also never negotiate how much we do and take a view on how tired he is. Sometimes this means that we have to sit it out, coregulate and get calm first. He will settle down and then does fine after the first couple of pages and he is making perfectly fine progress - not as good as my eldest, so it is possible he is dyslexic or has a minor learning difficultly and I am monitoring that, but in my personal view for my son, it is right to separate the fact that something is hard for him (and be empathetic about it and find ways to support it) from the idea that he can avoid it because he has a unique specific difficulty. My son tends to avoid or kick off about things that he finds frustrating, not just reading, so I see much of it as an extension of that, which I need to both empathise with AND challenge.

It sounds as if there is not just struggle but avoidance. how does your son manage frustration with tasks outside reading?

I could have written your post. My son is also y1, also struggles a lot, also read write inc. He (my son) will not have passed the phonics screening test.

We have a huge amount of dyslexia in the family - do you? We assume our son is dyslexic, he struggles with sequences and a lot of the "tell tale" signs. However he has also made a lit of progress this year - hes still behind but moving forwards. Has your son progressed over the year compared to where he was?

So if your DS's issues persist into Y2, I would suggest getting him checked for dyslexia, though that might have to wait until he is 7 or 8 to get an accurate result. If it is dyslexia, there are reading schemes designed for dyslexic DC, and they are absolutely transformative - I used one with as many DC as I had the time to fit in when I worked in a primary school, and the results never ceased to amaze me.

Good luck with it - it is incredibly tough when a child who badly wants to do well is struggling and frustrated.

Poor lad and poor you it sounds like he has got a block now. Only way out of that is to focus on stories being fun I think.

When you’re reading stories to him perhaps just ‘oh what’s that word, what’s that letter, can you see it’ - without making it onerous.

Any video games like Animal crossing with small texts that he likes? Subtitles on any programs?

Do mention it to school SENCO and try and pin them down about timelines, mention dyslexia and that he gets really upset now.

Not to focus too much on that, because it may not be that, but the British dyslexia association has a list of possible signs that may be helpful https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/advice/children/is-my-child-dyslexic/signs-of-dyslexia-primary-age

ADHD can impact academic progress but Dyslexia is worth considering if he failed the phonics test. If it's 'just' ADHD a tutor might help, especially if distractions in the classroom are affecting him. But getting the assessments done would be good because if it's Dyslexia there are specific adjustments he could have at school.

I echo the points above - phonics doesn’t work for all children. It works for most children, so it has become the dominant approach.

What are you doing at home to support the phonics? Are you following the same “scheme” as school?

Our school did Read Write Inc (RWI) and I bought some flash cards from Vinted so we could practice the phonic sounds just like they did at school.

I also made up my own games with ds.

Bought Junior Scrabble on Vinted. He hated that!

But one that worked very well for my ds’s confidence was to chop up a cereal box into small rectangles and write letters and later words on them. I would use red pen for the common exceptions (like “said”) just like RWI does.

We would play a game like how many could he read in two minutes. He was allowed to sound out loud to help him, or “sound in his head” or do word recognition.

As he got better and better, I would drop some of the easier duplicates (so we didn’t have cat, bat, fat, sat, mat, hat, and pat - we might just keep “fat” in his word box).

I also played a game where I gave a bag of things and he would pull out ten things and he had to find the wordcard on the table. Sticking closely to phonic sounds he knows! So the bag might contain a spoon, a (fidget) toy, a coin, some plastic food from his toy kitchen like an egg, burger, apple, and things from his toy farm like a cow, man, pig.

You can make it harder and harder.

Once he got the hang of that, I started to introduce a “which one is spelled right?” game, so this time, the word cards showed the wrong spelling half the time. He had to pick the ones spelled correctly. So he might have to choose between “table” and “tabel”
Interestingly by this stage, this last game he found extremely easy - it was almost impossible to catch him out. I pointed out to him that this meant all his reading had made his brain absorb the way a word should look when it’s written down correctly. He knew an awful lot more than he thought he did (and more than I thought he did!).

if your ds passed the Phonic Test this year, he’s probably doing fine and with some gamified top-ups where he generally wins (don’t make it so hard he loses heart and cries!) you’ll find he does ok.

Oh I also did use a home made sticker chart - so when he got to 10 stickers (5 days of practice a week) he got a tube of fruit pastilles (his favourite). I’m not beyond a bit of cheap incentivisation!

My child passed the phonics test (I have no idea how!) and is severely dyslexic. You wint be able to get a full assessment until Y3 (8 years old) but phonics are not the solution for some children. My child still cant break down words with phonics in Y5. She uses sight reading and its working so far for her.

I would 100% recommend a full assessment when they reach 8, sadly you will have to pay privately for this (500-800 ish) as no schools fund them now.

My son completely struggled with phonics. The teachers accused him of being lazy and naughty because he could read well in group sessions where they all sat on the carpet and read the whiteboard, but could not read books in one to one settings. We got his eyesight checked because he said he could not read the words in books. He was diagnosed as longsighted (very!) and we hoped that would help, but it did not. He said he could see the words now but they moved on the page. So we paid for a private dyslexia screening and he was found to have visual stress. He was given yellow lenses for his glasses, and it fixed things overnight.

I do think it is outrageous that schools require a minimum level of reading ability by certain ages, but will not assist children and parents who need help for conditions such as various eyesight problems, adhd or dyslexia until the child is older. How is the child supposed to keep up with their classmates if they have a disability holding them back but cannot be screened for until an arbitrary older age?

I’ll echo your experiences about school only caring about behaviour. Don’t rely on them. Year 1 may not be panic stations yet, but they will quite happily stick a quiet lad on a back table and ignore until it does become a problem.

You do need to start pinning down exactly where the difficulty is. If he’s quiet and trying then dyslexia may be a possibility. Can he recognise single letter phonemes? Is it blending that becomes an issue?

Personally I had to be very strict with my adhd lad to get him to sit still for 5 mins and learn anything in those early years!

DS couldn’t get phonics. He was assessed by an Ed Psych as school suspected dyslexia. He isn’t dyslexic, he’s just one of the children phonics doesn’t work for. School took him off phonics and taught him sight reading instead which worked much better for him. He got 8’s in both GCSE Eng Lang & Lit and just been predicted A*s for A Level history and classical civilisation. Your DS is still very young (and DS is late August born which probably didn’t help), but if he’s still struggling in a year or so maybe an Ed Psych assessment may help?

Phonics doesn’t work for every child. Gove and co started emphasising it as a way to prevent reading by sight because they decided children weren’t fully comprehending what they were reading that way. Alien words were another Goveism to help prevent reading by sight. I learnt by sight, I’ve been an avid reader since 3 and did my degree, masters and PhD in American Literature, now lecture in it.

My DS with SEN hates alien words with a passion, he tries to convert them into real words. He still passed the screening with flying colours and can read fluently but he thinks alien words are daft, which they are.

If you can afford it the app reading eggs is really good. 10 minutes a day nakes a huge difference. They do a free 2 week trial so its worth giving it a go. The also have summer catch up resources.

https://readingeggs.co.uk/hpsuboffer/

You could also try teach your monsters how to read. Its free if you have laptop. You have to pay to use it on a tablet or phone.

Primary school dismissed the idea of dyslexia because my child could read (albeit slowly).

When they got older, the child told me that they 'read' by knowing the shape of the word. If they don't already know what the word looks like, they can't 'read' it or break it down phonetically (as I would with a word I'd never seen before).

Primary school dismissed the idea of dyslexia because my child could read (albeit slowly).

When they got older, the child told me that they 'read' by knowing the shape of the word. If they don't already know what the word looks like, they can't 'read' it or break it down phonetically (as I would with a word I'd never seen before).

My dyslexic child couldn't (and still can't) break down unfamiliar words using their phonetic knowledge.

The primary school weren't concerned when they missed out simple words when reading or when they complained of the words moving around the page in year 1. When I said that I was concerned about dyslexia, they totally dismissed the suggestion. Child was diagnosed as dyslexic at age 8 (by a private Ed Psych).

Got to secondary school and has had 3 years of 1:1 English Tuition to get them through English Language GCSE.

Child absolutely hates reading because of these difficulties even though we read to the child every night until about the age of 11. There wasn't a shortage of books in our house. Said child has never willingly picked up a book to read for pleasure.

I would invest in a private Ed Psych report to assess your child's abilities. They will make recommendations from their assessment.

He's still rather young and some kids are just slower to get started.

There are phonics resources you can get to use at home. I would not go over the top, but a short practice each day, combined with printing, could be helpful over the summer. And just lots of reading together, you reading stories out loud.

DD1 didn’t take well to phonics, I don’t think her brain operates like that, but we decided to try the EasyRead computer learning course with her. It has not been cheap but the difference it has made to her reading, and confidence in reading, is incredible. She’s gone from being slightly below average I would say to one of the top readers in her class, as told by the teacher a couple of weeks ago who was very impressed with the improvement in about six months. The support from them is really fantastic too, you can phone them, they do Zoom lessons etc. all included.

I’ve been really impressed, but it is expensive.

I feel it’s been worth the money but she could well have found her way to where she is eventually anyway. But she was getting put off reading entirely because she was struggling, school reading books often ended in anger/tears, she didn’t want to read books or read signs or do any of it. Whereas six months later, she just sat on a train and read a book the whole way.

Rather than worrying about phonics, what is his actual reading like? If he can read I wouldn’t worry about the phonics. They are only one way that children learn to read. My DD never understood phonics and ‘failed’ the tests but has always been a fantastic reader. Her teacher told me not to worry about her phonics ability, as she clearly learned to read by sight.

A tutor will only work if they follow the same reaching scheme as the school, otherwise you risk massively confusing him and making the situation worse.

The best things you can do are 1) talk to achool, get them to sned you work and tips to help support at home and 2) read with him all the time. Read recipes, shopping list, anything and everything. It is not a gimic, reading makes a huge difference

I would suggest adding phonological awareness into the mix. An ability to hear the sounds that make up a word, and discriminate between them, is a really important part of learning to read. There are lots of resources online.

Read, read, read and read to him. Every opportunity you get. It’s the thing that makes the most difference.

She also has adhd traits but no diagnosis of that- she learns best in short, energetic bursts.