Reading...again....

[becaroo]

Am getting worried re: ds1's (7) reading and am cross with myself as I feel I am letting him down.

I am trying to ease off and not pressure him as he already hates literacy and reading due to his experiences at school (he was labelled a sruggling reader in year 1 and was made fun of becasue of it) but I am getting worried because he no longer reads at night to us anymore (I was quite strict about it but dh is less so) and he appears to have forgotten some of the sight words that I know he knew 6 months ago when we took him out of school.

I just do not know what to do.....do I just carry on as we are with him doing very very little reading and hope he gets fed up and decides he wants to learn to read? or do I need to do something now? I am even considering hiring a tutor once a week as I feel I hve done so badly at this

Any advice gratefully received...

I'm afraid that I would suggest that any child who cannot read by the age of ten is disadvantaged, whether educated at home or in a school. However, the OP's child is only 7 and if she follows the good advice which has been given to her on this thread, he should be reading confidently and competently by age 10; unless he has some, at present undetected, significant difficulty which prevents him from easily learning the basic skills.

I think late readers are disadvantaged because
1)it is only through the written word that a child acquires a really extensive vocabulary (research has shown that TV, radio and everyday conversation have a very restricted vocabulary)

2. Visual and auditory media cannot offer the depth of knowledge which can be found in written media (I include the internet and e-books in this), nor encompass the full witten output and are not always as easy or convenient to access.

3. In the auditory and visual media everything is explained and interpreted through a third party. It is rarely possible to go back to primary written sources, or to be able to access the original writings of authorities in any field (apart from that of Literature, of course). I appreciate that most people's 'knowledge' comes to them via a third party interpretation, but good readers have the power to check and evaluate what they have been told.

This might not seem terribly relevant to the experience/education of a ten year old, but late acquisition of reading (unless the child is an exceptionally voracious reader when they do eventually achieve competence) will always leave a child millions of 'words' behind their peers who learned earlier. This could be particularly significant if the child wants to take an academic subject in HE, or wants to pursue a career which requires a high degree of skill in reading and writing.

Point taken re: 16 year olds leaving school who cant read!

My ds1 can read short cvc, ccvc and cvcc words and some sight words like "the" "and" "who" etc - he just hates it

He can also sound out quite well when he tries (which is not very often!)

I agree with maizieD how important reading is. I am trying to get ds1 to understand that all the cool stuff he wants to do when he is older will require him to be fairly competant and reading and writing and that, once learned he will never forget it. I have also told him that reading is essentially about learning a few rules and a few tricks and thats it. I have been equating it to learning to ride his bike without stabilizers which last year he thought he would never be able to do. Cut to this year and he is riding round everywhere like a pro! Probably not a good analogy but I think he took it on board.

"I'm afraid that I would suggest that any child who cannot read by the age of ten is disadvantaged, whether educated at home or in a school."

I agree with most of your arguments but not your conclusion. I think you are disregarding the option of reading to the child extensively, either directly or through audiobooks. This may be even better than reading for oneself: most children's listening comprehension far outstrips their reading comprehension, so they get access to more sophisticated material this way. If an adult is reading to them in person then there are good opportunities to discuss the book.

Second, there is the fact that many "competent" readers do not choose to read for pleasure, perhaps having been put off reading by being pushed too hard. If their love of reading has been switched off, any short-term advantage they may have gained from the vocabulary, grammar and general knowledge they've been forced to acquire will not be of much use to them.

My daughter became a good reader at nine. Before that, having heard many thousands of books, she was excelling in most respects, all except spelling! In the 18 months since she's mastered reading, she has leapt ahead (even the spelling is nearly OK now), because she loves reading and chooses to read often. I don't think she would love reading now if she had not been allowed to come to it in her own time. I think I would have done her a great disservice if I had turned her off reading by pressing her to do it earlier.

You're right that seven isn't ten, so perhaps this isn't relevant to the original discussion. But I think naming any magic age by which a child ought to be reading is a bit dodgy, as it puts fear into parents, and that doesn't help. The fact that schoolchildren rarely become fluent readers late in their school career may be an indication of how strongly they have come to fear and dislike reading through being under pressure to do it. In this sense, there is a "window of opportunity" for learning to read at school: children who don't master it by then are labelled as failing and may give up. But there do seem to be a great many HE children who come to reading a later age with no adverse effects, if they are free of expectations that they ought to be reading earlier.

very wise posts on this thread! interesting to read.

so hard to feel comfortable with this 'window of opportunity' idea, especially given how the pressure has upset becaroo's little boy while he was still at school. It angers me that schools think it's ok to label children this way, given that it's widely stated that 7 is the age where all children should be ready. how can they therefore say a child is failing when they're only 5?! I think it's true of so many things, that if you put too much pressure on a child to do something before they're ready it can make things worse not better - be it reading, counting, potty training even!

becaroo - random suggestion. have you looked at the nonsense word test yet (linked by MaizieD)? I thought of a twist on that theme. if he's reluctant to read for the test, what about making up some nonsense words together?

you could design an alien race/planet (paint them or whatever, could encompass geography etc etc) and tell him they need their own language. he could come up with some nonsense words and assign them meanings, and he would have to use his sounding out ability to write them down (or spell them for you to write them). you could then write down the meanings so you'd have your own alien dictionary, and maybe you could translate some sentences using it ("hello mummy how are you" etc)...

disclaimer: I'm a total novice with all this phonics stuff (and indeed with 7yos!), so this idea could be totally stoopid, but it may be worth a go!

Just dashing out to work-but got to comment on the idea that a child who reads late, is necesarily always limited in vocabulary.
DD2 left school aged nearly 9. completely unable to read or spell even her own name.
Severely dsylexic she had no word attack skills at all as she couldn't distinguish the phonic sounds nor the shapes of the words.

We home educated autonomously. Followed her own interests, didn't make her so reading at all til she was ready.
We read to her, she watched DVDs/TV, she listened to story tapes-everything and anything we could do for her to regain a love of the written word, which she hated so much.
And we talked and talked and talked to her about whatever she was interested in and whatever came up.

She finally began to 'get reading' aged 13. By 15 she began a OU starter course, which she passed easily.
Used that to get into college.
She was recently resassesd for dslexia. She is just below average in spelling, an above average reader ...............and her vocabulary and comprehension scores were so high, they have never had anyone who scored so highly.

I have watched her debate home education with MPs and Ministers and with a few members of Local Authorities. Many of whom have commeneted on her being so confident and very articulate.

will come back to this later....need to go to work now!

Some really intersting posts - my gut feeling with ds1 is that he will do it when he is ready....that has been his way from being a baby. I tried to tell the nursery and school this but I think they thought I was making excuses for him. HV and Paeds used to say "ds1 should be doing this by now" and when he didnt I felt not only fear that there was something "wrong" with my son but that I had somehow caused it.

Ds1 had some significant developmental delay as a baby (he had IUGR and was only 4.5lbs at term) and initially they thought he had CP. We had weekly visits to the hospital in his early weeks and they told me that he could be deaf and blind.

With lots of TLC and having been given IV antibiotics for a strep infection in his blood he got slowly better at feeding and therefore stronger. His jaundice went too. He finally sat up unaided at 9 months. At 10 months he started crawling and at 13 months he walked. He talked "late" at 2.5 but then so did my husband so perhaps not so surprising.

Ds1 had some speech immaturity til he was 5 -not unusual IMO - but the school made an issue of it and a SALT came to see us at home
a year ago. Basically ds1 said "t" for "d" and "c" for "g". Thats it. She had him pronouncing them correctly in 5 mins and was out the door in 15 mins. She was the one who told me how good his vocab was!!

Poor ds1 has been made to feel since year 1 that he was not good enough, was told he was on the "thick table" and was called "slow" by the other children. I found all this out 2 weeks before I deregistered him. It breaks my heart that I let this happen. It is my fault.

Sorry for the long post....I think I need to accept my part in his unhappiness and move on from here.

Thanks again x

oh becaroo! please don't feel like that. none of this is your fault. you took him out just 2 weeks after you found out all that stuff!

you did not 'let this happen'. nobody expects their child to be treated like that in school and nobody deserves it. it is the school that let your son down, not you.

you've taken him out now and it's been lovely to read how his confidence has grown, how he is doing things he wouldn't have dreamed of before. this is what matters now.

it might take time but you'll get there, he is doing so well getting over the tough start he had and that is down to you.

I can understand you feeling guilty, but you really have nothing to feel guilty for.

OK?! xxx

Saracen said:

"But I think naming any magic age by which a child ought to be reading is a bit dodgy, as it puts fear into parents, and that doesn't help."

I am not trying to put fear into anyone; goodness, people have learned to read in their teens, twenties and beyond and gone on to do amazing things. I just think that the sooner the better. It isn't as if it is a difficult skill to master, if taught properly, and once children become confident that it is easy and they can do it they are usually perfectly happy to learn. The fear of failing again plays a large part in reluctance and apparent indifference to learning. I do say this with confidence as my day job is teaching struggling readers at KS3 (age 11+) and all but a tiny handful of them have no problem with reading once they find it is not the difficult task they thought it was.

"The fact that schoolchildren rarely become fluent readers late in their school career may be an indication of how strongly they have come to fear and dislike reading through being under pressure to do it."

Hmmm! It is my experience that children leave school as non-readers, in the main, because they have not been taught properly! Had they been properly taught from the start they may well have ended up as fluent and enthusiastic readers. They certainly do have a great fear and dislike of reading but this is because they don't know how to read.

Trying to make sense of the black squiggles on the page and knowing that you haven't a clue as to how it's done must be completely soul destroying. The closest I came to that feeling was when I first encountered some 17th century English handwriting. I knew it was English, I even recognised the odd word here and there, but the rest was a complete mystery.

Thank you for your kind words MMM
I appreciate it.

BUT whilst there is A LOT I can blame the school (and his dire year 1 teacher) for, I am his mother and the buck stops with me. I am trying, in HEing him, to undo the damage that has been done.

I am relieved that the LA will not demand to hear him read (the man who came out to us was very nice actually and very supportive) as ds1 would find that very traumatic.

This thread has been so very helpful to me (and others, I hope). I dont feel alone with this anymore.

Thank you all who have taken the time to post x