Having discovered the whole language "wall," the fact that my daughter was pretty much only reading memorized words and not reading anything new on her own, I started to try to get around or chip away at that wall. I started by trying to encourage my daughter to sound words out. But it was incredibly hard to get her to actually look at the letters in the words and not to just guess - with guesses that had sounds in them that had nothing to do with the actual word in front of my daughter. It was hard to get her not to focus on the pictures but to look at the words.
At first it was like a terrible battle of wills that I just did not want to have - after all reading is supposed to be fun and if it's not it's very difficult to get a child to read. But the whole language wall fought me hard. My daughter would shout, yell and cry, and tell me that she was stupid and that she couldn't read. It took a lot of patience in the face of incredible frustration for me and for her, but she had less.
When I finally got her focused on the letters in the words, I realized that she had almost no phonics skills - other than knowing the primary sounds of the letters and some blends - but she had seemingly lost some of the ability to combine those sounds that she had when she started kindergarten. So, I went out to my local parent/teacher store and sought advice on the best phonics workbooks. I ended up purchasing the 2nd Grade Spectrum Phonics books because the first grade seemed to concentrate mostly on the vowel sounds and some rules my daughter did actually know.
My daughter was excited to have the 2nd grade phonics book. She felt confident and proud of herself to have the 2nd grade phonics book. I started out by checking her knowledge of each phonics combination and if she knew the rule, we skipped those pages. If she did not know the rule, we practiced using the workbook pages. I folded over the corner of the book to mark where we left off each time we stopped and I told her that she could work on any pages we skipped before that corner whenever she wanted to, with or without my help.
It took us about 2 weeks to get through that phonics book, maybe a bit more. Much of it was over the break between Christmas and New Year's and a bit of time after that. After we were through that book, I made my own phonics cards using the sound combinations from the book. We reviewed those words every other day for awhile and I still bring them out from time to time as a reminder. During this time period, we stayed, for the most part, away from the reading books. I think that helped ease the pressure for my daughter.
When school resumed, my daughter started bringing home the G and the H level books instead of the I and J level books. About two weeks ago now, when I asked my daughter why she was bringing these books home, she told me that she's not an I and J level reader and that the teacher had told her that she was at G and H. But I could swear that my daughter had previously told me that she was allowed to pick out whatever level book she wanted to - even though they (the teacher and teaching assistant), to my understanding, try to encourage or direct the children to certain book levels. In the G and H books, however, my daughter rarely if ever would come across a word that needed sounding out. So, I'm not sure why this started happening, but it could have derailed my phonics efforts but for the fact that of course, these books are not the only books we could use.
Fortunately, the night I asked my daughter about it, she had brought home a library book - Goldilcious, which I later learned was probably at 3rd grade reading level. I had her try to sound out using that book, and I came across the same problems as before, even with the phonics lessons. The big thing was my daughter's eyes roving all over the page. She told me she was trying to figure out what the word said. I explained to her that she needed to look at the letters in the words, but I just could not get her to do that. Once again, we were at a battle of wills. So, we just read a little. It was very little actually but I had to have her read some of it to avoid her deciding that she could block my efforts.
I thought about it over the next day during which I considered other approaches, such as photocopying her books and cutting out the pictures to handwriting my own stories. What I ended deciding to do was to have her write each word she could not read without sounding it out in a separate notebook, pushing the actual book with the pictures to the side - even closing it. From there, I drew lines breaking up the word for my daughter, helping her to see how it could be broken into manageable pieces. It was very slow going at first, but we went through about half of the book that way and I read the rest. Each and every time that my daughter succeeded in sounding out a word, I gave her a high five and a lot of praise. It was hard at first because even with me breaking each word up, my daughter still resisted and told me that she's dumb, stupid and can't read. But with each success, it became easier and easier. The next night we finished the whole book - it took us awhile to read that book, but we did it. The best part of it was that at the end my daughter was so proud of herself.
After using this technique for a couple of reading sessions, I stopped using the notebook and had my daughter read the words in the books directly. She resisted that at first, but I did not want her to have to rely on that and have the notebook become a bad habit like looking for a word's reading using the pictures, the first letter or the sentence context.
I have seen improvement, but we're still having some issues.
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