Kindergartner has made no reading progress

[Anonymous]

18:10 -- I agree that the OP should be concerned if the child is significantly behind at this point in FIRST GRADE. But the OP's child is in KINDERGARTEN. She doesn't have a "late bloomer" because it is completely normal not to "bloom" yet. Give the child a chance to bloom before labelling him a "late bloomer."

[Anonymous]

FWIW, our son couldn't really read until the summer after K-- it suddenly clicked (as my mom promised it would at some point) and now in 2d grade it seems he is one of the more advanced readers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:18:10 -- I agree that the OP should be concerned if the child is significantly behind at this point in FIRST GRADE. But the OP's child is in KINDERGARTEN. She doesn't have a "late bloomer" because it is completely normal not to "bloom" yet. Give the child a chance to bloom before labelling him a "late bloomer."

It's the end of kindergarten though.

And just being "behind" wouldn't concern me so much as the child appearing not to have made any progress as measured by teacher assessments all year. Plus the teacher's attitude (as interpreted by the OP) that she has decided her son just can't learn.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Waiting Rarely Works: "Late Boomers" Usually Just Wilt


"In the simplest terms, these studies ask: Do struggling readers catch up? The data from the studies are clear: Late bloomers are rare; skill deficits are almost always what prevent children from blooming as readers. This research may be counter-intuitive to elementary teachers who have seen late-bloomers in their own classes or heard about them from colleagues. But statistically speaking, such students are rare. (Actually, as we'll see, there is nearly a 90 percent chance that a poor reader in first grade will remain a poor reader.)


http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/fall2004/editorssb1.cfm

That was a very interesting article -- thanks for posting PP.

One thing I have noticed with kids who are later to read in early elementary school but suddenly catch up -- they can frequently have a lot of difficulty spelling.

I think they lack phonemic awareness and knowledge of the basic sound-symbol relationship in grades K and 1, and then (unless they receive direct remedial instruction) the skillss top being taught as most children have them in grades 2 and 3. Then some of the kids in the poor reading group start being able to read words or chunks of works but by a combination of using visual memory and context cues plus decoding just a few letters in each word, rather than sounding out unknown words. In fact these are strategies directly taught by teachers in most reading curriculua.

While using these combinations of strategies helps kids get through the text, they fail to help them really learn to sound out and spell words. They might be able to memorize words for a spelling test, but when it comes to writing a paragraph, these kids often have really crazy spellings, like "strhgit" for "straight". They know there's a g and an h in there somewhere and they just stick it in!

All if this is just to say to those parents whose kids are slow to start reading at first, but then seem to magically catch up .. keep an eye on the spelling.

[Anonymous]

Great post PP- this was true for my DC.

[Anonymous]

I wish I had had this article 3 years ago when I was trying to convince my daughter's 1st grade DCPS teacher we had a problem. I don't know if I want to scream or cry because we are in 4th grade and doing a lot of remedial tutoring and desperately hoping to catchup.

[Anonymous]

NP here. This is the best article I've read on the topic-thanks for posting.