“My son is going into grade-7, and reads at grade-2 level. His school provided phonics interventions over the years, but they didn’t help. We are very worried…” I’m going to violate all the niceties and just tell you the answer. My colleagues would be horrified – “How can you…
Revisiting BLENDING
Haroun’s word-attack skills are improving, particularly with longer compound words. He is more attentive to small function words like ‘a’ and ‘the’. But I have been increasingly worried about single-syllable words which he mispronounces and then doesn’t recognize. We started the BLENDING program back in December in our intensive “Christmas…
Finished the 2nd Hardy Boys
We finished our second Hardy Boys today. Yippee. He wants to stay with this series, so I’m heading off to the bookstore to pick up another title. Haroun’s word recognition skills have gotten much better through this book, he seems to have figured out the suffixing tricks and regularly nails…
World Knowledge
Last week was shortened by Eid celebrations. Haroun and I are reading our second ‘Hardy Boys’ book, punctuated with repeated-reading exercises during our two-hour-per-day sessions. He is making steady but uneventful progress, his accuracy, fluency, prosody, and confidence gradually improving. Today I asked him to read silently, but moving his…
Grade 4 Comprehension
Today we started a new Hardy Boys book. Here’s the first few lines of the story: “Would you like relish with that?” I pulled the steel tongs out of my apron pocket and plucked a plump pink weiner out of the steaming vat of water. “Just a smear of…
100 Most Common Words
We finished our first Hardy Boys book today, the one we started on Monday. Haroun is still reading aloud, and we still take turns reading although he is reading for longer and longer stretches. We average 90-100 minutes of reading in two sessions, plus a repeated-reading or writing exercise. It…
More Googling the Hardy Boys
Continuing to read Hardy Boys and having great fun. We are googling frequently for world-knowledge, which slows us down but gives Haroun small breaks. He’s reading more than he realizes. This Hardy Boys book (‘Burned’) takes place in a school that Haroun can relate to. The kids are a bit…
The Challenge of ‘World Knowledge’
We finished our ‘Wimpy Kid’ on Friday, and Haroun was tired. So I read the first chapter of a ‘Hardy Boys’ to him, with the warning that this book would be hard for him and the offer that we would only continue if he liked it, otherwise we would find…
Progress after One Week…
We have been pounding away at fingerpoint-reading all week – five days in a row. We average about 90 minutes per day, including ‘Repeated Readings’. The gains from this intensive practice are easily visible in this 90-second video. Haroun is reading faster and with more confidence. He is hitting some…
Curiosity and Creativity
This article on the perils of grade 9 was a wake-up call to me. The goal isn’t to just get Haroun reading, but to build him up as student who can traverse high school and get into university. The more I thought about it, the bigger the challenge became. A…
Repeated Reading
It is Canada Day, but H. and I worked anyhow. The key to this intervention is *intensity* and daily practice. Today we practiced finger-point reading for 90 minutes, wrote a hamburger essay, played with affixes for ‘DICT’ (pre+dict+ion, contra+dict+ory, dict+ate+or), and talked about mindset and education on our break. And…
