Sight reading update

My son is 6 years old. As I've mentioned a long time ago, we have been teaching my son sight reading. It was a very long journey since we started 2 years ago, but my son is doing amazingly well. He is currently (sight) reading level B books. So, please, know it works. It takes time and for the first year we have been practicing every single evening. Usually for no more than 5 to 10 minutes. These days we are aiming for one or two books every day.

We recently had our 3 year evaluation (part of the IEP process) and my son scored in 90 percentile for word recognition. How cool is that? The IEP team was truly impressed - the 6 year IEP coming soon! This couldn't have come at a better time as we are transitioning to public school kindergarten.

Check out Natalie Hale's book: Down Syndrome Parenting 101: Must-have advice for making your life easier. She does a really good job explaining why sight reading is important for our children. Teaching my son to read at a very young age was probably the best thing we did for his education so far. 

Here is what worked for us:

• the Down syndrome learning program strategies - match, name, select. The materials are free and they work!
• the "Special Words" app, based on the same match, name, select strategy. Many of the same words from the DS learning program materials.
• practice, practice, practice! Every day for almost two years.
• we graduated from the learning program materials to Scholastic leveled books: First little readers level A, First little readers level B, soon to start First little readers level C.