B.'s mother called me when B. was in kindergarten. An obviously bright child, most of her classmates were reading. She wasn't, and this was causing B. a lot of distress. The mother was not overly concerned that she wasn't reading; after all, this WAS kindergarten. But she was concerned about the child's anxiety over it. In my initial assessment, B. knew all her sounds, even x, but she couldn't spell or read a single word. As we began our first lesson, I realized although she knew the sounds, she didn't know why she knew them and what relationship they had to reading. Once I explained that we put letters together to make words, she excitedly began to spell cat and fat and bat. I helped her memorize sight words that couldn't be sounded out and by the second lesson she was writing sentences. About two months later we started on The Boxcar Children and she got hooked on the series. We'd start a book and she'd finish it before I'd return. I worked with her about a year and through her school career, she'd check in about once a year, usually with a grammar question. She's now a financial analyst with a masters degree from UNC.
C., an equally bright first grader, was a whiz in math but had great difficulties with reading and spelling. He had already began to label himself as dumb and was shy and withdrawn. It took six months before he was able to blend the letters in a three letter word. His mother had me tutor him every summer as well as the school year. I bribed him with M & M's to get him to read a simple sentence and we tried every trick I knew. Nothing in the written realm came easily to him.
He was in fifth grade when the Harry Potter craze hit, and all his friends were reading it. C. brought me his copy of the book and asked if we could read that. I knew that his skills were far too low for this book, but I took a deep breath and we started. He'd read a page with agonizingly slowness and a lot of help, and then I'd read two pages. In an hour, we'd get through maybe six pages.
One Monday he came in and said, "You're going to be really mad at me." "Yeah?" I said. "Why?" "I read ahead 116 pages," he answered and proceeded to tell me what I'd missed. "Oh, yeah, I"m furious," I replied. He grinned. Somehow that weekend, all the things we'd worked on for five years came together and made sense. I worked with him for five more years, continuing the reading but concentrating on the writing assignments that became increasingly more complex. He is now an engineering student at Purdue.
D. came to me in the 7th grade, with a diagnosis of autism and dyslexia. The school system had told his mother that he didn't have the cognitive ability to learn to read, but a savvy psychologist had prescribed a phonetic approach. When I started, he had to think every time he spelled his name. We marched through Wilson books 1, 2, 3, and 4, and his mother reported he was looking up things on Wikopedia at home. We began Mary Pope Osborne's three book series The Odyssey, which he loved. After three years, the school system tested him at 12th grade reading level and my work with him was through. His spelling still lags behind his reading and he uses an Alpha-Smart for his classwork. He has an A average in 10th grade English.
So when a parent asks me how long it will take, I can never answer that. Every child is different, and all I can say is that we'll know when we get there.
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