Teaching children how to read

I am witnessing the failure of reading that is decontextualized. So much emphasis is placed on teaching kids how to decode, but they, or at least Hannah, does not have a clue what she is reading. Instead, when I ask her to read from a book that has context and she likes, she attempts to make meaning from the text. So why this emphasis on decoding and measuring kids ability to read from reading decontextualized text?

This week

Hannah has been reading and writing every day this week. She is much more confident, but she has trouble pronouncing words in which there does not seem to be a clear pattern, from her perspective though what has been working is using reading strategies. For example, she had difficulty reading The and all words starting with the, like them, there then so I taught her how to read the and then add the other syllables. The other strategy is pronouncing /u/ when there are two o's in a word, like room, pool, root, moon, etc. these two strategies are working but I have to build on them....

Reading in English

Hannah is beginning to read. She is in the process of developing automaticity. But she has trouble remembering some of the sight words she is supposed to remember by now. I keep questioning whether this is the effect of having to work with two languages or whether she has a learning problem. Those little books that have a lot of sight words repeated allow her to repeat the words, but she is simply repeating and does not retain the info. This is because she looks at the pictures and she relies on her background knowledge. What seems to be helping is having her read a book she really likes, like Pinkilicious. This book has a lot of the sight words she is supposed to know. But at the same time, it has content! And she is more interestered an invested in reading this book than in reading those little books that only provide repetition.

I need to have Hannah develop reading confidence, which is what she lacks. As a parent, it is very difficult to see your child struggling and you are telling her. Yes! You see! You can read! This is great! If anyone can give me suggestions on how to help her develop confidence, I would really appreciate it!