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[quote=Anonymous]I have a rising 3rd grader who is an excellent reader now.  As a rising 2nd grader, however, he was struggling and hating reading.  I never expected him to struggle because he is a really smart kid.  He understands so much and has a great memory.  Learning to read was work and he wasn't interested in the work.  Also, I think he wasn't interested in the books.  See, he loved to have us read to him and we read higher level books.  The "I Can Read" books are...well, do you like reading these stories?  They are stripped down, stilted, lack flow and description.  I was giving him these books to bring up his reading, but what I really needed him to do was get interested in reading on his own.  The first step is to motivate DC to practice with harder texts and more interesting texts so that reading becomes easier and something to look forward to.

This is what worked for us:  I found a chapter book at an interest/intellectual level appropriate for my son, but was much harder than the what he had been reading.  It had easy to follow print with good spacing.  If it helps, it was "My Life As A Book" 
http://www.amazon.com/My-Life-Book-Janet-Tashjian/dp/0312672896/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1372768453&sr=8-1&keywords=my+life+as+a+book

Then I gave him incentive to read beyond what had been previously required of him.  In our case, he read a chapter to me after school and got a dollar toward a certain toy he wanted (a $10 toy, so the goal was achievable in a reasonable amount of time).  Extra chapters read meant extra dollars.  And since this was a chapter book with a story that interested him, he wanted to find out what happened next--i.e. the story wasn't complete when his reading was.  I would read to him at night, but from a different book, so that if he wanted to continue the My Life... story, he had to read it.

I was hard at first, and I absolutely had to sit with him while he read.  He was skipping words like your DD (but he skipped all the connecting words and lost the meaning that way, but he'd do the guess-at-a-longer-word-and-move-on trick, too), so I would stop him and say "try again and this time read all the words." I'd use my finger to point to each word and slow him down.  I'd only ask if he understood the sentence AFTER he'd read it correctly (so that he could succeed and grow in confidence).  And if the content or wording was such that I didn't think he was getting a passage, I would explain it without quizzing him first.  He really started picking up steam about 2/3rds of the way through the book.  I still sat with him, but the corrections were much less frequent.

Anyway, that got him over the hump of struggling with reading.  The next ones we read were the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series.  He flew through those -- maybe they are easier, too, and you might want to start with them, but they don't have clear chapter breaks that would work with the incentive set-up.  Now, he reads on his own and we have to tell him to turn off the light and go to sleep.  So, take heart, struggling now does not mean she won't be a reader.  Just get books she wants to read and incentives to practice.  My son and I have continued the exercise to increase his skills.  He reads easier books on his own and together we read books above his level (currently, "The Name of This Book is Secret" series.  They take work for him, but he wants to find out what happens, so he works for it!  The chapters have gotten longer, so now I ask him to read for 20 minutes, then I'll finish the chapter.  It's good for us.

Hope that helps![/quote]

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