I have been trying to teach Lance to read. It is clear that I am not the ideal teacher, at least to children. I just don’t have the patience. So this whole experiment is as much a test of my patience as it is a test of Lance’s headstrong will-power. I just don’t want him to struggle like Kyle seemingly struggled with reading. I want him to enjoy reading from the get go. So on the recommendation of a friend (Thanks, Nicole) who had successfully used it, I purchased the book, Teach your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.
We started it when school started last fall, but we were not making much progress very quickly. It was a fight. I do mean a fight. So I backed off a little bit. Once we got into it again, he was doing much better, but it wasn’t a perfect set-up. It was still a fight. He was recognizing the sounds readily however. We took Christmas break off. Well, we hadn’t worked on it since Thanksgiving. Probably part of the problem right there. Any time we’ve skipped more than a couple of days I’d go back 3-4 lessons for review so he wasn’t starting fresh and possibly not remember anything.
I picked it back up this week. It again was a big fight. We’re talking tears kind of fight about how he doesn’t want to do it and me assuring him that he has no choice. The child is very stubborn sometimes. He must get that from one or both of his parents. Anyway, yesterday was a knock down drag out temper tantrum crying fighting kind of day. I told him that if it was too hard and he kept crying instead of trying I’d start over at the front of the book. He didn’t shape up. We started over and we worked through the book all the way to wear we had stopped. It is amazing how fast the tears dry up when they realize that you mean business.
Yesterday, we managed to get all the way to Lesson 13. That is the first lesson where they read an entire sentence. He read his very first sentence yesterday! Go Lance! Go Lance! *happy dance* Now granted the sentence was only “See me eat.” But it was a sentence still the same.
I can honestly say that today was not such a big fight. I still had to remind him when he was complaining about it being too hard or him being too tired to do it that we’d simply go back to the beginning of the book and do the entire thing over again. Wow, he immediately quit whimpering about how he didn’t want to do it.
Today, we reviewed Lesson 13 and he was able to slowly read the same sentence again. Yay! We then did Lessons 14 and 15. He read 3 sentences today: See me eat. See me read. Mad at me. He also read several individual words throughout the 3 lessons.
It is slow going and almost torturous for me, but we’re making progress. He might actually learn to read before he goes to school. If he can at least recognize a few words I will be happy. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
His counting is coming along nicely too. He can now more consistently count to 10 by himself. Granted he’s consuming a LOT of M&M candies to get that consistency, but I am OK with that if it means that he’ll actually TRY to count.
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