We worked on reading all last year with little progress. It was strained; it was a struggle. Last year, reading was a cross between guessing and memorizing—with lots of tears in between. My oldest read almost without me teaching him; it was instinct. But my daughter struggles to hear the sounds and to blend them in order. She struggles to keep all those letters and sounds from flipping backwards and inside out in her head. My daughter is dyslexic, and so far learning to read has meant lots of tears.
But this year, we are finally seeing progress. Slowly but surely, she is reading, and she’s still smiling! She’s reading words that she sees during the day on packaging and store signs, not just during school with a required reader. I know a year makes a lot of difference in development and maturity, so some of our success could be due to that. But a huge part of our success has been the Logic of English Foundations curriculum that we are using this year. With this curriculum, the steps to reading are very incremental, taking nothing for granted. And the games make reading irresistible. She marches and jumps and twists and turns to learn her sounds. She plays games to learn how to sound out words and blend them back together. And with each game, we’ve inched closer to that final goal that has seemed so out of reach. She’s learning to read.
She earns blocks to build a tower by reading words.
She moves her game piece down her colored board by reading blends and words.
She races across the room and up the stairs in a reading relay.
And she makes her own books, cutting and pasting the right picture into the book after reading the page.
She’s just finished the first level of this program (Foundations A), and we are both ecstatic at the results: not just that she is reading, but that she is smiling, too.
