Reward charts rock

You may be aware that Rosemary has been showing reluctance in learning to read. Or it might be better described as ‘lack of motivation’, or just plain ‘lack of concentration’.

She has her phonics down pat and loved learning the sounds and actions. She knows plenty of the double-letter sounds and even a fair few tricky words. But sit her down in front of a reading book and she will wriggle, chat about the picture, mull over what she’s going to have for dinner, pick her nose, scratch her bum… essentially do anything but actually look at the letters on the page.

On the odd occasion when she decides she’s going to look at the words and attempt to read a page, she does it perfectly. Sight-recognises a good few words (I can, the, up, on, said…) and sounds out or just semi-sounds out (m-en, c-up, p-ot) lots of others. Of course, in harder books she’ll come across confusing or complicated sounds but, if she’s concentrating she’ll often work them out from context and breaking the word into bits, etc.

But she rarely concentrates. Here or at school.

So, on Thursday night, after spending 20 minutes reading the same page, I came up with an idea. A reading reward chart.

It’s been a while since we tried reward charts for anything, but we’ve always had good results in using them to get off the mark with something, and then petering them out without any issues – they’ve  helped with staying asleep all night, staying dry, getting dressed without any fuss and even eating dinner.

I suggested to Rosemary that I could make a reading reward chart and that she could get one star for every page she read. And when she’d filled it up she could get a special prize. What would she like? A Snow White costume. I said I’d put enough stars on, so she could get the costume next week if she read two or three pages a night, but pointed out that if she read loads, she could get it quicker.

Last night she read two pages, still with a fair bit of reluctance and lack of concentration. It took about 15 minutes to get that far and then she decided she’d had enough.

Tonight she read 13 pages. Yes, 13. There were a couple of points where she seemed to be getting a bit bored and messing about a little, but for the most part she just sat there and read the pages with ease. She now has 6 pages left to get her Snow White costume, so if she reads to me in the morning, she might be able to pick it up after swimming.

And if she keeps it up, we may well need to file for bankruptcy in a few months.