Before starting: Paul was in Grade 2 in Canada and about a year behind in reading. His progress was slow; his mother says it was like “torture” to practice reading with him, because he was constantly guessing words. His decoding and blending skills were close to zero and spelling was a nightmare for him. It was as if he couldn’t even hear the sounds in a word.
During the lesson process: Paul has focusing issues which caused some of the frustration he and his mother had before starting the course. But the lessons seemed to hold his attention better, to the point where they stopped working on stress-inducing outside reading just to focus on the program. At first he wasn’t overly excited by the whole process, but soon he started to “get it” and to believe that it was helping him. Of course the prizes worked wonders too for motivation! Around Lesson 90 – just like the parent training said – results started to show outside the program. Paul would read words in his environment, like those written on household objects. He also shifted to looking at all the letters in a word rather than just the first couple (which would lead to a guess).
Results so far: Paul is now at Lesson 117. His mother has been seeing some amazing results in his reading and spelling is starting to shift too. At night they read the Hank Zipzer books before bed and Paul will chip in with a sentence or two. He prefers to read to himself now… and this is a child who a few months ago would only look at the pictures in books.
His mother wrote in just this week: “he has gone from not even hearing the sounds in a word and guessing to being able to decode. Now even when he doesn’t get a word right (especially the ones that are more irregular) he gets at least close to what it would make sense to read whereas before he would just spit out a word that starts with the same letter and nothing else would be similar. You turned him around, taught him from scratch and now he is going in the right direction. I know that his evolution will not stop now because he was given the tools he never had before. And what is surprising to me is that we see this progress despite reading such short texts. I guess 3 minutes of decoding are more valuable than 30 minutes of struggle and guessing! I know he is growing confident and he is happy to be able to read a lot more than before. I am so grateful I found you.
The days when we would all scream our heads off and cry when reading are long gone!”
Well done Paul and mum Diana!
