Darren’s inability to read has been a MAJOR concern for us especially when he is just a few months from being admitted to his Primary School.  Teacher’s feedback on his poor reading skill has added more pressure.

 Picking up the skill of reading was easy for his elder brother and I just cannot re-apply the previous technique used on Brendan. This reaffirms that every child’s learning ability and interest is different.  Parenting approach is definitely a “concoction of different formulae” for different children.

More in a panicky mood, I explored different methods to enable him to read, which include exploring different learning schools, PC softwares, exposing him to reading aloud from story books and the most drastic action was changing his school!  The result was “NO RESULT”.  Many reasons behind the failure: he could not catch up with the reading standard of his peers in the new school and was merely memorizing the statements in the story books or guessing the statement from the pictures.

Darren is definitely a bright boy but was just unable to grasp the correct reading technique. I was undaunted by the failure.  I went on to experiment Mummy’s Home Based Reading Programme  for Darren, combined with a 1.5 hour weekly tuition at a neighbourhood  centre.  I am so glad that the result pays off!

1)      Teaching him step-by-step the letter sounds, words with vowels, consonant blends, words ending with different sounds. Have stacked up my home book shelves with different phonics books but my own preferred reference is Phonics Picture Dictionary by Judith Sim, published by Newton Publications Pte Ltd. It gives me a good guide to structure my teaching and what to teach.

There is no OVERNIGHT MAGIC but once he picks up the concept of step 1, reading, creating and writing sentences have become easier. We are still in the BASIC stage but as long as we are adopting the correct learning technique on him, I am sure our efforts will yield brighter results.

Moral of the story is never give up on our kids and believing in their strength. Give them a chance to experience a suitable learning technique on them.

Denesa