Starting 2nd grade and not reading

[maciascl]

Ds1 is 7 1/2 years old and will start 2nd grade (we hs through a public charter) and is not reading. In fact he has little interest in learning to read. He almost acts as if he feels like it is too hard so he feels stupid because he can't do it. We have the HeadSprout reading program that he did about half of last year but we decided to repeat most of them because he wasn't retaining it, or atleast wasn't able to transfer what he learned to anything outside of the HeadSprout program. He enjoys doing them when he feels like it but fights me if I suggest it. However he fights my suggestions on just about anything. 

I haven't been worried but I am starting to. Especially because I think he feels like he is stupid and that really bothers me. He does great in math it is just reading. We focused on writing alot last year to try and put reading off a bit and his penmanship is really good now. DH says he was the same way in school and was told he had a learning disability but no one in his family can tell me what it was. We both sort of feel it was an excuse to put him in special ed classes. This of course made DH feel that much more unintelligent and that has stuck with him all his life. Even now he uses it as a bit of a crutch and thinks he isn't smart enough to do certain things.

[PGTlatte]

I recommend having him examined by a COVD optometrist.  Our son needed a full year of vision therapy for both eye teaming issues and visual processing issues before he was able to get past the very first steps of learning to read.   The year of therapy made a huge difference for him.  

http://www.covd.org/

I came back to add further explanation.  He got stuck.  He got phonics and could sound out words.  He should have made progress from there, but was stuck for most of a year.  Fluency does not come from getting really fast at sounding out words.  It comes from remembering them after you have decoded them a few times.  He was completely unable to do this.  Like if a page had two lines of text, with the word cat on both lines, and then again on the next page and the next, he would laboriously sound out cat each time.  This never changed and was happening with even the easiest words like up, and, sat, etc.  He decoded the entire Bob books series, but could not remember a single word, ever. 

He also had problems with reversing letters and words (he would try to decode them backwards).  His vision and eye teaming problems turned out to be severe.  After those were treated, what was left were his visual processing problems and those became obvious then.  He had almost no visual memory being used.  He also had a problem with form constancy - having a consistent mental image of something - and visual closure - being able to figure out a whole image from some of the parts or recognize a part of the whole. He was truly unable to build any sort of "word bank" with the visual memory issue, and the form constancy and visual closure problems were making it very difficult for him to recognize what he was seeing.

If your son has gone through the first steps of learning to read, but then continued consistent hard work does not lead to any progress at all over several months, that is when I would want to get vision, eye teaming, and visual processing checked out.  A normal optometrist usually cannot test for these or recognize these problems.  Our son tested at 20/30 after amblyopia treatment with a normal optometrist and we were told he had "no more problems".  He had major problems, but the optomtrist did not have the expertise to recognize them. 

If you do look for a COVD evaluation, there is something else.  Unfortunately, not all COVD optometrists go as far as visual processing.  Some treat eye teaming issues but do not test for visual processing problems.  If you look for a COVD optometrist, I would specifically ask if the therapies get into the area of visual processing.  Our son's therapy would not have been very helpful overall if they had stopped before treating the VP issues.  I would not waste time and money with a COVD optometrist who cannot see the therapy all the way through.

Edited by PGTlatte - 7/17/11 at 4:05am

[ednkirstin]

I don't know if it would help, but you could try the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.  It has worked great for all six of my kids.  I have a sister with learning disabilities, who, according to experts would never read.  My mom used it with her years ago, and she reads pretty well now.  Reading is not her favorite thing, but she's got the ability to read what she needs to.  One of the things I like about the 100 lessons book, is that there is a tangible "end."  My kids feel like they "know how to read" when they finish the book.  Even though they still have more to learn, they're willing to try branch out to "regular" books because they have the confidence that they "know" how to read now.  If you use the 100 lessons book, you may want to have some reward to be earned when he finishes the book.  It's a huge accomplishment.  In our family, it's tradition that our children receive their first Bible upon completion of the reading book.

I know what you mean about him feeling "stupid."  I have a daughter who really struggled with feeling dumb in spelling until we found All About Spelling.  You may want to look at that, too.  I feel that the 100 lessons book and AAS perfectly complement one another.

Edited by ednkirstin - 7/14/11 at 3:04am

[Callimom]

Have you read any of the checklists about dyslexia? You can find some checklists here

If most of those don't present as issues, and if his eyes have been checked, then I would give it a bit more time and just keep doing "fun" literacy stuff - rhyming games, read alouds where you trace under the letters, 1/2 an hour of family reading time where everyone looks at their own books, lots of interesting things to do that involve literacy skills (board games, computer games, comics in the bathroom, secret codes, madlibs, puzzles, videos, riddles and joke books) .

A couple of good books are Wordplay by Lori Goodman (very active games) and Games for Reading by Peggy Kaye.

I would have an honest talk with him about how not reading yet affects him. If he's concerned or feeling hampered by it,  it would be a good starting point for putting together a plan for the summer for some reading time together. And the summer has a natural "end point" where you can transition to something different if you need to. It also has some great opportunities for things like doing reading under a tree, sidewalk chalk reading games etc.

Good luck!

Karen

[Daffodil]

If he were my kid, I think I'd want to get a clear idea of what he knows how to do and what he seems to have trouble with.  Does he know all the letters and their sounds?  Does he know how to sound out a 3-letter nonsense word like "jup" or "fim?"  If he can't do it, is it because he hasn't had enough instruction about how to do it, or has it been explained to him a lot but he's just not getting it?  If he can do it, what is it that he still can't do?  The direction I'd take next would depend on answers to questions like those.  If he's had enough phonics instruction that it seems like he ought to know letter sounds and be able to sound out CVC words, and he's had some chances to practice, and he still can't do it well, I'd probably start reading about dyslexia.  If he hasn't had much instruction or practice, I'd probably try to figure out a way to give him more.  (Obviously, I'm coming at this with a bias toward phonics.)

[Susan1124]

Our 9 1/2 year old ds really just started reading about a year ago. He reads very well now. I know from our local hs community that the kids in the group have started to read at all ages, some very young and some pre-teens.

If yor ds' penmanship is fine, it's clear there is nothing wrong with his eyesight. I feel that kids become ready to learn at all different ages. If you read to him lots he will eventually become interested in reading. I have seen many different things spark the interest. For some kids it has been a trading card game where they need to read what is written on the cards. For others, it has been comic books. I think it is important to simply be patient and not to put pressure on him.

I'd focus more on reassuring him that you know he's not stupid and that he is free to learn how to read when he is ready. This may change his outlook altogether. You can tell him about all the things that he is good at and continue to encourage his writing.

In her excellent book, Your Child's Growing Mind, author Jane Healy talks about brain development and discusses how a specific part of the brain needs to mature before effective reading is possible. She states that this part of the brain (the parietal lobe) matures at anywhere from 3 to 9 years old. The parietal lobe connects the processes for such things as sight, sound, touch and body awareness. The idea is that until we can combine these brain functions, we won't be using the right parts of the brain to read. This is why some children are able to decode words in a text but can't comprehend the meaning of all the words together (the story).

I hope you are able to wait and let him develop more while continuing to have interesting things to read lying around. Comic books are not my favorite but I know a lot of kids who have learned to read with them.

Warmly,

Susan

[Lillian J]

I don't know why I didn't think earlier about this old thread - it has a lot of helpful and reassuring input regarding that age and even older:  "I have a 7 year old non-reader" support group. 

I agree with Karen and Laundrycrisis regarding looking into dyslexia and vision skill deficiencies. Vision skill training made a dramatic difference for my son at the age of 12 - he had been reading fine by then, but it was labored, and he didn't enjoy it, and the therapy changed all that. Here's an article I wrote about our experience with vision therapy. Before that, he did a dyslexia training, after I'd read The Gift of Dyslexia, and I was impressed with the book and the program, but it didn't seem to be his problem, although I found that I had some dyslexia, myself. The trainer happened to also be familiar with vision therapy, because she personally had both issues, so she noticed that my son's eyes weren't tracking smoothly across the page when reading, and sent us to her own vision therapist. Here's my account of Ron Davis dyslexia program - "Dyslexia - a gift?"  Ron Davis was in special ed classes, by the way, back in the day when they were seriously negative and demeaning experiences that fell into abuse in many cases - but he grew up to become a successful businessman and artist, and he discovered what it was that was allowing him to do some things so well while having difficulties with others and to use that as a tool.

All the best, and I want to reassure you that this is not at all as uncommon or daunting as you probably think right now. 

Lillian

[4evermom]

My ds didn't start to take off with reading until after he turned 8.  He just acquired more and more sight words during that year and was reading well enough to muddle his way through the 3rd grade standardized test when he was 8 1/2.  I still didn't consider him a "reader" but he could read well enough when he had to and scored above average.  He doesn't like demonstrating knowledge of which he is unsure so I didn't really know how much he knew until he took that mandatory test.  He always hated phonics and being told to sound it out.  He's a visual spatial learner and they say they do better with bigger words.  All the basic phonics books full of short similar words are actually harder for them to read because all the words look so similar. 

It's good to rule out learning disabilities and vision problems but it is also very normal for 7 yos to not be quite ready for reading.

[Lillian J]

Originally Posted by 4evermom 

It's good to rule out learning disabilities and vision problems but it is also very normal for 7 yos to not be quite ready for reading.

Absolutely!         Lillian

[MathMomma]

I recently read "Unicorns Are Real:  A Right-Brained Approach to Learning."  The author pointed out that interpretation of phonics is a left-brain function, so right-brained children may have difficulty piecing words together.  She suggested teaching whole words rather than breaking them into pieces.  She also had some exercises that help the two hemispheres work together.  It was an interesting read.

[2xy]

Originally Posted by ednkirstin 

I don't know if it would help, but you could try the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.  It has worked great for all six of my kids.  I have a sister with learning disabilities, who, according to experts would never read. 

I also used this book with my somewhat reluctant reader (DS2). He learned to read at age 7.

[maciascl]

Thank you all for the suggestions. I will look into them. We are going to order the All About Spelling for this school year. I think it will help me a lot too! I am starting to thing that he is just lacking confidence and motivation. The other day he was looking at a Captain Underpants book and I told him that there are certain kinds of books that I am not going to read him and that is 1 of them. That seemed to be motivation because he is trying hard all of a sudden. We will see how it goes but I am far less worried now.

[2xy]

Originally Posted by maciascl 

Thank you all for the suggestions. I will look into them. We are going to order the All About Spelling for this school year. I think it will help me a lot too! I am starting to thing that he is just lacking confidence and motivation. The other day he was looking at a Captain Underpants book and I told him that there are certain kinds of books that I am not going to read him and that is 1 of them. That seemed to be motivation because he is trying hard all of a sudden. We will see how it goes but I am far less worried now.

OMG! That is EXACTLY how it went down with my DS. LOL!

I had no problem with reading to him, but I wasn't going to read comic books out loud. That's just too darned tedious. After I told him that he'd have to buckle down and learn to read Captain Underpants on his own, he was willing to sit through the 100 Easy Lessons. :)

[lmonter]

I've heard similar stories of boys who are reluctant readers, until they come across something they *really* want to read, then they're gung-ho about it.  For hubby, it was comic books.  For my 7.5yo who can sound out some smaller words and memorize road signs (I don't truly think he's reading them all the time, but I could be wrong), it might be the Mike Holmes magazine we get since he's all kinds of excited about houses and building and repairs, and we don't want to read every little thing in it to him.

And I'm not going to full on push my 7yo to read and make it a chore/un-fun.  We homeschool so we can go at the child's pace, so why rush him before he's ready?  And we have All About Spelling as well, he really likes it.  Last year I didn't really get to it as much as I'd wanted, but this year we're planning to use it a lot more regularly, so I'm betting I'll see a difference by the end of the year.  :)

[23missb]

My 8 year old daughter just finally took off more with the reading. She has found the whole process difficult for the most part and seems to have quite a few traits of dyslexia so I've just been working with her on her weaknesses and playing up her strengths. I still read to her every night before bed though so she has lots of story time, and a big thing for us was making sure the materials she was reading were interesting and engaging for her. There are a ton of junior graphic novels out there now and that's the genre she does best with.