1. WHAT THE PAST WAS LIKE
Before Easyread, Sophie would get frustrated easily and “shut down.” She knew a lot of words by sight, which for us, meant she would forget them when she was tired. We had lots of mistakes and lots of guessing.
2. PREVIOUS INTERVENTIONS DONE
Before Easyread, we focused on the using the school curriculum for additional help. I quickly found that learning high frequency words by immediate sight recall wasn’t working. Beyond the school curriculum, we focused on getting simple leveled readers with characters she enjoyed and simple vocabulary. It was helping a little, but not to the extent we needed, and she still wanted me to just “give” her words she didn’t know rather than try to work through them.
3. THE EASYREAD EXPERIENCE
Working through Easyread has mostly been quite fun for Sophie. Once she learned the trainertext characters, she started to become more confident in her own ability to decode rather than instantly looking to me for help…to “give” her the word. She hasn’t been overly fond of the typing games because they challenge her, but I LOVE them! It’s a great skill to teach so early! The short lessons are great, and as long as we do them before she gets too tired in the evening, there are no issues with focus and attention.
4. THE OUTCOMES
Sophie is reading more fluently. The guessing game is almost completely gone, and she takes her time to work through challenging words. She still gets frustrated that she isn’t quite as quick as her peers, but she is definitely reading at a second-grade level now. With her last evaluation at school, she read 92 WPM on a “cold read.” She got that up to 128 WPM after seeing the passage a few times. She is also consistently spelling better!
5. THE IMPACT & VALUE DELIVERED
I’m very hopeful that this is a permanent change in how she approaches reading. As her confidence continues to grow, I hope she will find new ways to challenge herself. It seemed like a huge financial investment at first, but it is so worth it to be reading without tears!
(Mother of Sophie, age 7, lesson 100)