Need to hear from Junior High/Middle School English teachers

[westsideteacher]

Straight off, I would say to work on high-frequency word recognition and reading fluency skills. In your position, I might go so far as to work on prefixes and suffixes... and definitely vocabulary acquisition.

[westsideteacher]

Another piece of advice:

DO NOT allow him to just "follow along" while a voice (yours or a recorded one) reads a book to him.

Also, I recommend "A Child Called It" (by Dave Pelzer) for him. (It's riveting. A few times, the B word is used, and I think the F word just once, but you can skim through and white-out those words if you'd like.)

Step one is to get him excited and interested in reading. I teach high school English, and I find that the remedial kids often have negative opinions of reading in general. Hopefully your kid doesn't feel that way already.

Of utmost importance is to have him read a variety of high-interest, low frustration reading. This means he should be allowed access to lots of magazines, comic books, or whatever strikes his fancy. Your library has magazines he can look at. Stop by any comic book store and inquire about what series would be appropriate for his maturity level. Comic books can be used to teach him punctuation, stylistic choices (using italic and bold fonts), vocabulary, plot diagrams, etc, etc, etc...

Have him read novels, too... but instead of getting a list from us, why not take him to the book store? Let him wander around and find something he thinks looks interesting. Good reading skills can be taught using almost anything. Don't get elitist - if he's struggling, he'll just get frustrated if you try to get him to read something "classic". The point is to get him reading, and to get him interested in it.

Good readers are active readers. Model active reading for him. Pick up a book, read a paragraph or two out loud, ranomly pausing to say what you're thinking about the story.

[westsideteacher]

(Sorry to post again. Just thought of something else.)

If either of you has a smart phone, download the Dictionary.com app. I find it supereasy to just whip it out during class and type in the word I need...

I'm a teacher and I know the kids shouldn't use their phones during class, but I do grant this one little exception.