My Reception child refuses to read at home

[mumof32015]

My DS who has just turned 5, point blank refuses to read at home. He knows all his letter sounds really well. If we ask him can you point to something that starts with this letter or that letter he can easily tell you. However when it comes to sitting down and blending phonics together he just refuses to do it, goes stiff and then tells me he doesn't know the words. He then refuses to even tell us the letters in the word. I am finding it really frustrating, and it worries me he's going to start falling behind at school.
Does anyone have any suggestions about how I can make learning to read fun?

My youngest son was like this. I asked at school and they said keep reading to him. I found putting the subtitles on his favourite TV show helped and reading with him in the morning instead of after school when he is not so tired

My daughter was like this. Make sure you have his eyes tested made a massive difference to my daughter as she needed glasses only a slight prescription but her eyes were so tired at the end of the day to read she probably couldn’t do it comfortably.

I was also going to recommend the usborne first readers. We got them for Christmas and I like that they combine sections for the adult to read with bits for children to read. It means the stories are less dull and it feels like a shared experience. My 4yo has been much more enthusiastic about them than the school books.

This must have been so demoralising for you
We had a very negative parents evening this term, where his teacher told us about how quiet and reserved he is, and how he doesn't seem to grasp simple tasks. I know he can do a lot better than what his teacher is sayin, and I just don't know what to think.

It sounds like you'd do well to go back to the teacher at the start of this term and ask for more specific ideas for helping your dc at home.
Is it a confidence issue? Something specific the teacher can pinpoint that you can work on?

Like so many in this thread, my dc3 was a very reluctant reader so we didn't make her read at home. I read to her and she had loads of audio books to go through at her own pace
We did do the maths homework though as it was less fractious all round and it felt like we were cooperating with the school
It's so easy to turn a child off reading by making them do what the school regime says instead of helping each child to learn in their own way
And like so many pp above, my dc got there eventually- picked up a book and just read it straight through- fluently and confidently. But when she was ready, not when school told her to...

He's only 5. I would back off for a bit for both of you. Does he enjoy being read to? I would focus on that and come back to the reading aloud gently. It's not a race, though the school system does make it feel that way sometimes.

Just saw your additional post. When DS started reception he was very overwhelmed by the noise and hustle and bustle and found it virtually impossible to follow what was going on and make sense of what was expected of him. As a defence mechanism, he tended to go off into a daydream and get very little done. He is very smart but to the teachers he came across - in their words - as "low ability". He wasn't picking up reading or writing so we had him assessed very early on by an educational psychologist and he turned out to have very severe dyslexia and some processing issues which were impacting on his ability to follow instructions in class.
The diagnosis helped me as a parent to understand what he needed. He is in secondary now, doing amazingly and is a voracious reader. Not saying your DS has anything going on beyond being just 5, but worth keeping an open mind and investigating if you think his school performance doesn't match what you know he is capable of. xxx

DS became like this, reading always resulting in tantrums and storming off! It took ages for me to realise it wasn't because he was being naughty, it was because he had a difficulty.

Signed him up to Easyread on their free trial and they spotted he had an eye tracking weakness which had never been picked up in school or at the optician!!!! We've worked on this doing some exercises and he loves his reading sessions now as they are very game based! Definitely give it a go!