Reading suggestions

[TrevinoLn]

My 7 year old daughter is both an excellent reader, and a decidedly average reader. Phonetically, she isn't very strong (too much whole language instruction we are now trying to undo). However, her comprehension levels are high, she reads aloud expressively better than any of the 4th graders I've seen in my Sunday School class, and she certainly has the reading endurance for chapter books (she read Henry Huggins and Charlotte's Web last week). She has reached that delightful stage where she would rather be reading than doing most anything else.

The problem is that when there are difficult words, she makes something up, or just skips. We've been going through the Ordinary Parent's Guide with her, which has improved her accuracy a good deal, but it is slow.

She is both ready and not ready for "the next step", with Narnia, Little House, Beverly Cleary, etc. I'd love for her to be reading all of these works, and I'm sure she'd love to begin, but I want her to actually read them.

Any suggestions? She's currently going through books that we read aloud to her last year, but that won't last much longer at her pace.

[StephanieF]

Can you encourage her to ask you when she doesn't know a word or would there be too many she doesn't know? I know that my ds9 still asks me if there is a word that he doesn't understand the meaning of. That way she could make a start on these books? If she reads them aloud that will slow her down a bit and you'll beable to spot when she has got a word wrong even if you aren't sitting right next to her.
Stephanie

[cillakat]

REWARDS intermediate is a great program for specifically this issue.

here's what another hivemind mom wrote wrt decoding multisyllabic words with an otherwise good reader:
"Once a child can read regular short vowel words, including nonsense words like grun, spag, frung, etc. with automaticity, and is at about a 4th grade comprehension level, you can use the REWARDS intermediate program by Sopris West (publ). REWARDS is scripted, so as a teacher, you know that you're "doing it right."

sopriswest.com is the website, I believe

[JennW in SoCal]

Well, I'd have to say I still "make up" a word on occasion when I encounter one I don't know!! I'll blithely skip over a word because I get what it means by the the context of the story and just want to move on! I'd really have missed out on so many wonderful books if I had been prevented from reading them because I didn't already know every single word in the text.

One suggestion I have is to get some of those books in audio format and let her listen to them while reading along -- or have 2 copies of the book and take turns reading to each other. That way she can see the word as it is pronounced correctly or when she is reading you can catch those made up versions of words. Or another way of finding her "made up" words is to choose a sentence from her reading that has some tricky words and give it as a dictation exercize.

But whatever you do, don't stop her from reading whatever she wants. It isn't necessary to micro-manage every bit of her intellectual life!! It is ok if she is skipping over some words. A bright, voracious reader will eventually figure out those mystery words through context and the frequency of encountering them. And if you are working through a good phonics program she will figure it out sooner than later.

Hope that helps...