My husband and I are happy with the progress we see in his normal reading.It is just like you say, slow but steady. Now that he has the “technique” to decode rather than guess, we started asking him to do a bit of extra reading because he has catching up to do. You know, before Easyread he had big issues with the short words that all looked similar. He doesn’t have that problem anymore with these high frequency words. On occasions if he doesn’t feel like reading and wants to finish it faster and there is a longer word he is tempted to guess because it is an effort to sound out. But he is not stupid. He does realize that guessing leads to errors, of course if he reads the wrong word it won\’t make sense in the context most times. This weekend we went to the bookstore (my 10 year old reads big books). Paul wanted a Ninjago book, which does have text but it also has a lego figure and I was sure he only wanted it for the lego. Besides, the text in that book is not easy. So, I agreed to buy it only if he agreed to read from a book I found which I thought perfect for his level: The Toad and the Frog. So we bought both books. At home that night he read from his Ninjago book, to my surprise, and today he took it to school.