Two months or so ago, for several reasons, Elodie became quite reluctant to pursue her reading. She was progressing nicely but everything became too overwhelming and the barriers went up. I thought a good deal about how I could tackle the problem and decided, considering her character, to let it drop completely for a while and allow her to pursue other avenues. We kept up with her flash cards and individual words but let the books sit on the shelf for a while without her actually realising I had made this decision. This continued for about 6 weeks.
I kept the very first Primary Phonics book she completed last year on her desk and, as off-hand as I could manage, told her she could read it on her own when she was ready. One night she asked if she could read it to Dominique as a bedtime story which she did and which Dominique thought was great :) She then asked for the first 4 books in her bed and told me the next day that she had read them all to her teddies for which she got a big hug :)
For the past week she has seemed ready to be able to tackle the books again so at lunch time today I popped book 8 in front of her and told her to read me the first sentence after she had finished her mouthful. She nodded vigorously at me and chewed away looking at the page. She finished and read the first 3 sentences, so beautifully that I grinned! It was great and she was so pleased with herself.
She is also enjoying working out how to write words - i.e. she wrote mud. She wrote book as 'bk' - very interesting as (for our Bedfordshire UK accent) it is phonetically correct! All in all she's doing well and by the end of the book at lunchtime today we were both grinning :)