DH is stressing about reading and writing.

Start with book with no words the oxford reading tree books are great, i can't wait to get Biff, Chip and Kipper back into the house.

Kieran isn't academic at all either, he does fine in school but it doesn't interest him, the days they do experiments etc he adores, when I spoke to his teacher recently she said they would bring some of his interests into the classromm, that is they way this damm curriculum of excellence is meant to work !!

It will come though, don't panic

I have a friend in Oz who started out with a rule in the supermarket to encourage her boys to read...
the rule was 'If you can read it, we can buy it"

Her boys are now excellent readers and she is living to regret the rule

Kids normally start school at 5 over here, and even then "writing" lessons seem (from what I can gather) to mostly consist of pen control, so drawing straight lines, wiggly lines, zigzags, doing mazes etc.
She sounds like she's doing great.

I don't know if the UK has anything similar, but over here we have Reading Eggs: http://readingeggs.com.au/ Iris loves it; as far as she's concerned, she's playing games. But it actually breaks down reading so she's learning phonics. She enjoys it as an accompaniment to books, as it's helping her to pick out sounds and words in books. It's really adding to her love of reading. (And we just use it as a stand alone thing, we've not bothered with the accompanying workbooks or anything.)

Start with book with no words the oxford reading tree books are great, i can't wait to get Biff, Chip and Kipper back into the house.

They've just arrived in our house they're fab Steph They've got some in Morrisons too

You can read them free online here: http://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/Library/Index/?AgeGroup=2

Start with book with no words the oxford reading tree books are great, i can't wait to get Biff, Chip and Kipper back into the house.

They've just arrived in our house they're fab Steph They've got some in Morrisons too

See I don't like them - and Martha can't understand why there aren't any words in them.......

Neither could Isabelle Ruth

She's actually pretty good when she tries as I discovered this morning, but she's better at pattern recognition than the phonics lark...

Neither could Isabelle Ruth

She's actually pretty good when she tries as I discovered this morning, but she's better at pattern recognition than the phonics lark...

I suspect she's a bit like Martha in that most stuff comes easily to her. Martha won't try if she's not in the mood and hates struggling with anything, and so doesn't want to try too hard in case she fails. She can read simple phonics already but getting her to have a go is very difficult.