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Hello friends! My ds has struggled through phonics all along! Ugh! However, he has improved a great deal and now we just need to improve upon his phonics abilities. He recently took a reading assessment on-line at MindPlay.com and the results indicated what I already knew: he's below average in phonics and above average in comprehension.

We were using All About Spelling last year which did seem to help a bit but not too much with remembering all of the rules and all of the rule-breakers! It took a good chuck of time as well and with having 3 kiddos to school we opted this year to try dictation. This has been great though it's obviously not helping to improve his phonics skills.

So, I'm just wondering if there are those of you out there who could help me to decide what I can add in to our day to practice with phonics, other than reading which we already do! Ds has been going through the Emergent Readers since last year. We're about to begin The Bears on Hemlock Mountain. We've not been able to just go from one book to the next because he just wasn't ready to make the jump to another level. That's been fine, we just find other books at that particular reading level and linger at that level for awhile until he seems ready!

So....any thoughts? I was hoping for the magical "click" moment when all words just opened up to this book lover of mine! However, that doesn't seem to be the case!

TIA! I really appreciate your insights!

We used Phonics Pathways as a follow-up kind of phonics program. It can be done in small chunks and is done in a friendly, fun way. My kids loved the Dewey character in the book and that made them want to use the book. I don't if that will help, but it's what we used.

We used the Reading Lesson and after a while with the easiest library readers, we've started the ER set. I've added Phonics Pathways, 5-10 minutes (or 1/2 page to a page) because I noticed ds couldn't read much out of context - he used picture and sentence clues very well to figure out what the words were, as opposed to using the rules We started around the middle and are just moseying through it a little each day, and I'm very pleased at the improvements in this area. It's very easy to open it and read, which works well for us

I don't know if this is okay to post on here, so please remove it if it's not, but along with the ERs, we have done a page of ETC each day. I just picked the level that she seemed to be at after we finished up RME. She was around level 6. It takes about 5 minutes each day, or less, and it really helped to cement things for her, and just remind her of some of the other rules. It has fit perfectly using it with the ERs.

I'm not sure how old your little one is, but I thought this was an excellent thread in regard to phonics...
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7429&p=54276#p54276

A few things that helped my dc at this stage of reading...
*keep the readings short (the ERS does a nice job of this)
*let my ds practice reading the pages before reading them out loud to me
*having ds track under the line he was reading as he read (he didn't like this, but needed to do it for awhile)
*having a markerboard handy for when he missed a word; with a black marker I'd write out the word he missed one sound /chunk at a time, have him sound it out, and then slide his finger under it to blend it all together quickly
*encouraging him to read at night before bed with very easy books, he got to stay up longer when he did this, having easier books was the key here
*listening to audio books and FOLLOWING ALONG as he listened (key that he followed along, this increases reading comprehension and vocabulary as well as fluency)
*added Explode the Code workbooks only, and let him choose 1-4 pages to do a day

HTH! Please take heart this is quite normal! Both of my sons are now excellent readers, but both went through stages of needing some extra help.
In Christ,
Julie