After homeschooling for a decade and teaching two children to read, I felt confident making the assessment that my 3rd child’s difficulty reading was more than a passing phase. At six years old, she can read just barely on a Kindergarten level. I was told my some that my concerns were unwarranted. I was told that one day reading would just click. I was told I was impatient and that some children do not read until they are 8 years old. I told myself not to listen to others but my instincts. My expectations of my daughter are not too high. I knew I was not expecting too much. Moreover, I felt her heart sink when she just couldn’t sound out a word. She was trying. She was interested. She wanted to read.
My daughter asked me to teach her how to read but I was left helpless. I tried many different methods, curricula and advice to no avail. For a short time she seemed to improve but then she became stagnant. At the beginning of this year she and a little boy of the same age could not read. By the middle of the year he was reading and she still was not. This saddened her and broke my heart for her. She begged me not to teach her little sister how to read before her. Her older siblings mistook her zoned out appearance and disinterest in books as laziness and tried to encourage her in a discouraging way. In the beginning, I also felt she was disinterested and lazy. She knew all her phonics. Yet, she could not put them together and even had difficulty with letters of the alphabet. She is six going on seven and still writes her name backwards at times. I knew her difficulty was not rooted in laziness. If not that, what was it? A search for answers began….