When my student at Monta Loma School moved away four years ago, the teacher asked me if I would work with another little girl.  Of course I was happy to.  She told me the little girl really wanted to learn to read.  She was in  third grade in a special day class.  She knew most of her alphabet and a few of her sounds.  Oh, and, by the way,  the testing showed she had zero memory for reading.  I'm still not sure what that means but was ready to give it a try.

And so Tasha (not her real name)  and I begin our journey.  Using a multi-sensory phonics approach we tackled our crazy English language.  It was slow going.  Using a series called Short Books we learned some sight words.  Each page of the ten page book had only one word and one picture.  As we proceeded, we graduated to the Fun With Dick and Jane series.  Oh so boring but lots of repetition.  Just what she needed.  Imagine,  one of the books was mine from my early school days a million years ago.   Tasha was eager to learn but also easily frustrated.  Some days, when I could see frustration looming, I would  read to her and we would discuss the story and pictures.  She learned all the consonants, and we began work on the vowels.  She learned that "ea" says the long E sound, until we got to the word "bread"  and that "ou" sounds like the "ou" in  "ouch"  until we came to "thought"  and so it goes.