Working through avoidance

LSEM > stories > Uncategorized > Working through avoidance

Working through avoidance

No Comments

When I first met “Student A” in 1st grade, he was a total joy—super social and could talk circles around any book I put in front of him. He had this incredible knack for retelling stories and making deep connections, but I soon realized it was actually a very clever way to avoid the actual act of reading. 

Beneath that cheerful exterior, he was really struggling to decode. To him, vowel patterns and syllable types felt like a secret code he just couldn’t crack. 

For a long time, it felt like two steps forward and one step back. Every September, we’d battle the “summer slide” and lose all that hard-won progress from the year before. But in 3rd grade, something finally clicked. 

We went back to the basics—focusing on phonemic awareness, prefixes, and suffixes. By pairing that intensive word work with decodables and high interest books, he stopped just memorizing words and started learning how to build them. 

The real breakthrough happened this past September. For the first time ever, the summer slide was gone. When he started fourth grade, he was only two levels behind, which proved those foundational skills were finally “sticking.” 

That momentum carried him right through the first trimester. By the end of the term, he officially reached grade-level proficiency! To celebrate his “graduation” from intervention, I gave him a bookmark and a book of Mad Libs. The look of pure pride on his face was the best part of my year. 

I checked in with him a few months later, and I’m happy to report that he’s still crushing it and staying right on track!