My school had a special teacher for students lagging behind in reading - a "Reading Recovery" teacher.  She would take students for an hour a day and work with them to help them catch up in reading skills.

If your daughter is at 2nd grade level in other subjects, ask the school how to work out having them bring in a tutor for your daughter and other students in the same situation.  It could be that, with continual budget cuts, the school is just falling back on keeping a student back a grade in stead of bringing in a tutor for the one subject that needs work.

Otherwise, if your daughter is in the lower age range for 2nd grade, I wouldn't fret too much about holding her back.  But - you'll still have to hit the reading hard this year.

This was a consideration with my son,,same grade,,I care nothing about what grade kids are in,,,learning is what is important.That said,if reading is the only problem area,see if  she can get into a reading class that doesn't keep her back in everything else,,but since reading is vital to learning anything,and if holding her back will help,,no foul,,and WHEN her reading is better,,she may be able to test out to her appropriate grade level.It didn't hurt my boy at all. Let her read whatever she wants,to you,and it will become much easier.Good Luck

In my daughters school parent volunteers worked with the children who needed a little extra help with reading. If that was not enough then the children had a chance to be placed with a special teacher to help them while still staying in the same grade.

Hey momlyons, Just saw your post and thought I would send you a quick    reply.

Going to struggle to be brief with this one, but I will give it a go.

I compete in international memory competitions and work with parents like you often in helping their kids to excel in spelling, reading etc. A brilliant place to start would be for your child to learn how to build her vocab up. The second obvious thing to do is to increase the amount of time dedicated to reading, starting off with simple books and working her way up to more challenging material. If she did these 2 things it wouldn't be long before she was the top reader in her class. ;o) But make sure that you get on top of things straight away. A great thing to do would be to learn effective memory techniques to make this a breeze and a whole lot of fun. If she can master this her confidence will go through the roof and in turn will radically increase her ability to read, spell etc. There is LOTS of hope, so don' stress! ;o)

The best technique for now that I can recommend is learning the roman rooms and routes method. Do a google search on this and try and work with your daughter in implementing it with her work. If you get stuck just pop me an email. (It would take quite a while to explain this. I have added a brief video link below to help) This technique will help your daughter radically increase her ability to remember words which ultimately will help with her reading. My friend D. Yip from china who I compete against at the World Memory Championships memorized the entire Oxford Dictionary, word for word, in english and chinese using this method... thats 58 000 words in perfect order so it can be done. He also secured a deal with the chinese government where he taught 500 000 kids between the ages of 5 and 9 how to memorize 1000 3 letter words and the results were astounding...all by using this same method. Here is a link which gives a basic understanding of how the technique works.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-xl7_hdWZo.

Andi Bell, who is in this video, has used this same technique to memorise 100 randomly shuffled decks of playing cards in just 5 hours! Thats 5200 cards in perfect order!

Ok, so this message is already very long. Would love to write more, but see how this works for you and let me know if you get stuck. You can email me through my website www.powerstudying.com if you need to. The other link I added, happychild, has great articles. Just make sure you click on the accelerated learning section.

Ok momlyons, Gotta run but hope this will help you and your daughter,

Warm Regards

Daren

Hi, i'm Lawanz and my child is facing the same exact problems. I would not recommend putting my child back. For 1 I feel some kids learn a little bit slower than others and holding a child back will only help them for that grade. What happens in the next grade and so on. Some teachers are so easy to give up on kids, I work extra hard with mines doing flash cards reading everything over and over to he gets it. I just feel practice make perfect! Like me have faith and it will get better. With math request extra worksheets to be sent go in and learn how the teacher is teaching so you can help her the same way.

Good Luck

A lot of the methods used are bogus. If the school is making her memorize sight-words, you can expect problems.

Google: "Dyslexia, Disability, and Deception: What Five Experts Say" for the case against sight-words.

Also see link.

Hello,

you can try this reading program.  Go www.readingeggs.com.  It will motivate her back to reading.  Please give her alot encouragement and walk her through.  Try this program.  Hope you will see alot improvement in her.

Good Luck!