My 7 year old is having trouble with reading what can i do?

If he has a dyslexia diagnosis, I highly recommend Susan Barton's Reading and Spelling System. http://www.bartonreading.com/ You can e-mail her to find out if there are any tutors in your area or purchase the kits one at a time to learn how to tutor your son yourself. It's a highly scripted program for one-on-one tutoring, so you don't need specialized training to learn to teach it (other Orton-Gillingham based methods like Slingerland or Linda-Mood Bell are designed more for whole class instruction). It's a lot cheaper to buy it yourself than to pay a tutor (specialized dyslexic tutors in my area charge $45-$75/hour), but sometimes it's hard for parents to put on the teacher hat with their children, in which case I'd recommend recruiting a grandparent/aunt/neighbor who would be willing to tutor 3 times a week. It's a long haul process, catching it in first grade is good, but it may take until 4th grade to be completely caught up with his peers and master the rules for hearing sounds, reading, and spelling. It's also really frustrating because it can be weeks or even months before you even start working on letters, because you first have to teach a child to hear all the sounds in a word and how to break the sounds apart.

That said, it may not be dyslexia (you'll find more info on http://www.brightsolutions.us/). If you could be more specific about what he's struggling with (i.e. sounding out words, confusing f/th/v sounds when spelling, sight words, etc), I might be able to make a more informed answer. It's also true that many first graders just struggle with reading and it clicks for them later. Students who are just a bit behind their peers (those who didn't like being read to and don't like to practice reading) can sometimes benefit from Sylvan or Score or one of those huge tutoring chains, but if it's a learning disability, you're better off getting a diagnosis than spending money on one of those centers, because nothing but specialized teaching methodologies will work. Unfortunately, teachers can't diagnose but usually they can offer a more informed opinion on whether there's a "learning issue" or if it's just immaturity. I'm sorry you have one that isn't helpful. Technically, the federal government requires that the public school system pay for tutoring if your child has a diagnosed learning disability and your IEP requires it, but in reality, the school systems lack the money and so they rarely diagnose themselves and don't have the budget for specialized programs. You'd spend more in lawyers fighting the educational system than you would to privately pay for tutoring, if it's a mild disability - if it's severe, I'd say fight for diagnosis and specialized help because it's really expensive.

EDIT: I just checked the bright solutions website and saw that Susan Barton is giving a free seminar in Pearland, Texas next week (no idea if that's close to you, but I saw Fort Worth and thought I'd throw it out there). She's also doing a tutor certification in Dallas in the end of March and so she'll have a list of newly certified tutors there - to be certified, the tutors have to have already taught multiple students and do a tutoring session with Susan herself, so they're really good - however, newly certified tutors usually charge less than those who have already built up a client base.

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Unfortunately, your son's teacher is very close to correct. Even if there was a diagnosed problem, there aren't many programs to help in TX. As a teacher, I have noticed that little boys especially show signs of problems that may not be there.

I recommend looking at the book 7 Keys to Comprehension. It's written for parents on how to help your child read. I'm having to read it as Professional Development and it is working wonders for my five-year-old. Find a used copy if you can. You won't need to read it cover-to-cover. It just has some good ideas.

A good "mini" test is to find a book a little "above" him, read it with him, and ask him to tell you the story. If he can, then it's not a comprehension issue. But having it tested and diagnosed, if you can afford it, would help you know for sure what he needs the most help in.

I changed my son's school and one day it finally "clicked". Smaller class, better teacher! Yay!

I agree with the video games, too- he loves video games and we pick out ones that have to make him read to get further along.

Also, he's obsessed with scary stories so I buy him the Goosebumps books at Goodwill so he can practice reading- they are about a 4th grade level and he is only in 1st grade, but he likes the challenge.

Dyslexia is an issue of each eye seeing the text in slightly differing ways making understanding very tough. there are mant diferent ways of trying to help but try testing with only one eye doing the reading. if this shows some improvement you might consider asking an optition to fit a pair of specticles with two different color lenses one grenn one pink of a failry light tone - not dark ike sunglasses. By each eye seeing the text independantly the brain merges the data with less scrambleing - this is not a one fix fits all but its quite a common aid.......

My seven year old struggled with reading in first grade, too.

Then, one day, he just 'got it'. And, he's been reading find, getting high scores in reading, since then.

It's a big step for kids to take, a big concept to grasp.

Surprisingly, what might have helped to push my son along, was video games! He liked playing adventures that had lots of conversations between the characters and cut scenes with narrative in them. We'd sit & read them with him, sometimes. But, we couldn't spend all day playing video games with him, so we'd go off & do our grownup things. And, then, he either had to hunt us down & ask us to come read for him -or- start trying to figure it out for himself. He decided to start trying to figure it out for himself :-)

Does your son have anything that he likes to do that involves reading?