[Gayle]

Maddie is above average in reading - she's 8 and she's read all the Harry Potter books and lots of others. She could read and write the alphabet before she got to school and didn't have any picture books (the first stage of Oxford reading) because she went straight on to books with words.

So, it was a bit of a shock for us when Zack didn't take to it quite so easily. In fact, it would be fair to say that it's only in the last couple of months that it's clicked with him and he's nearly six. He's had the same amount of home reading as Maddie had and we've read stories to them from an early age in exactly the same way. But he wasn't interested, he loved the stories but preferred us to tell them to him rather than him have to do the work. Like I said, it's all clicked and now he's reading everything and anything, we can't hold him back now (not that we'd want to).

My point with this very long tale is that kids all learn at different ages but it also needs a lot of perseverance from parents. We could easily have given up a year ago and not bothered about him reading well but we didn't. It's very frustrating when you've sat there night after night having to help him through the same books, but it's well worth it now.