Real Moms, Real Kids: Waiting for a Breakthrough

Have you ever felt like your child just doesn’t “get it”? You push and you teach and you teach some more, but you’re just met with resistance. A wide range of things can cause resistance when you’re teaching reading and spelling.

1.) Perhaps your child has undiagnosed vision problems, like this one.

2.) Maybe your child is a word-guesser, or handwriting is difficult.

3.) Maybe your child has dyslexic tendencies or undiagnosed auditory processing disorder.

4.) Perhaps you are spending too much time on reading lessons (or spelling lessons), and you need to back off a bit.

But it’s also possible that your child simply needs more time (and more of your patience). And when you finally get that breakthrough moment, it is glorious! Just ask Liana!

Liana* is a homeschool mom who uses All About Reading. She recently shared her breakthrough moment with us.

Here’s Liana:

I want to share an incredible moment that happened with Olivia, my seven-year-old daughter. She has always been a reluctant reader. Her pace was that of a snail and her interest near zero. The sight of a fluency practice sheet would cause her to groan in frustration and want to run. She didn’t have confidence in her ability to learn to read.

For months, whenever Olivia did her work, including the fluency sheets, she would doodle and draw on the words. She would draw smiley faces, slash marks, squiggles, dots around the letters, and so on. Sometimes it would take us several minutes to get through just one three-letter word. I’m ashamed to say this frustrated me more than it should have. I would try to get her back on track and bring her attention back to reading. It was pure struggle for both of us.

After months of struggle, I decided to see what would happen if I just sat back and let her do it her way. To me, it seemed she was wasting time and avoiding the work, but maybe for her there was value in that method.

After a few days of me keeping myself out of her process, something amazing happened. She naturally starting reading more smoothly each time we sat down together. The doodling continued and she even added color coding and symbols for the letters and words she hadn’t mastered yet. After a few more days, she began to read a few words at a time without making any “notes” on her page.

But then came the breakthrough.

Olivia was moving more quickly through her fluency sheet on that day, marking each word as she read it. Then, completely out of the blue, she tossed her highlighters aside and proclaimed, “Enough of this slow reading!” and just flew through it. I stared wide-eyed at my little girl who was confidently reading words that made her cry just a few short weeks ago.

She turned to me and said, “Mom, I’m a FABULOUS reader!”

Olivia is now reading everything she can get her hands on. All About Reading was the one thing that reached her and unlocked her newfound love of reading. The lessons are easy to follow and allowed us to move at the right pace for her. Here’s a video taken soon after she realized that she CAN learn to read.

So, there it is. My fabulous reader is full of smiles and confidence thanks to the wonderful All About Reading program. I’m glad I trusted her to know what she needed to do to get there.

P.S. Olivia is the second of three of my kids who are using All About Reading. My nine-year-old took off when we started using AAR a few years ago and my five-year-old is already reading like crazy thanks to All About Reading. My toddler will be starting as soon as he’s ready!

We are an AAR family!

Are you in need of a breakthrough moment? Post in the comments below or contact us!

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*To preserve the privacy of the child featured in this story, we did not use the family’s real names.