Reading is in the trenches because why did my 9 yr old nephew look at the word "jealous" and said "jewish"? And when asked why he mistaken it as such he said they both started with a "J". It's like his brain is doing autofill. No matter how many time I try to tell him slow down and sound out the words he just won't.
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TRAP CARD ACTIVATED
No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.
This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".
This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.
Intervene now, anon, or he's never going to read well.
It’s sometimes also called “three cueing” so watch for that term too. It’s awful. And if you have a kid with a good memory, you might not notice it right away, because they can memorize common words pretty well and it looks like they’re reading normally. Then in a few years when they start getting into more challenging texts, that strategy will fall apart and they will suddenly struggle.
We didn’t realize my son had been taught this until he was 10! He started falling behind in reading all of a sudden, and I started noticing weird patterns/ guessing when he was reading aloud.
And the toughest part is to fix it, you’ve got to go ALLLL the way back to beginner phonics! Fortunately, my son was so frustrated and fed up with not being able to read at grade level and not knowing why, and was willing to trust me when I told him the process to fix it was going to be slow and feel like he was going back to “little kid” stuff for a while as he retrains his brain.
That can be such a hard thing for kids to accept! And I don’t really blame them! If I found out I’d been taught a skill SO wrong that even though I’d been doing it for YEARS, I now had to start completely over? I might just give up too.
Here’s some free resources we’ve been using- and they ARE helping!
Read Not Guess is meant for parents. Our clear, easy-to-follow lessons will help you support--and monitor--your child's reading progress.
Free Phonics Materials for Teachers, Tutors, and Families Literacy is a civil right. The research supporting phonics is too strong to ignore
