FWIW my son went through the same sort of thing during emerging literacy and it drove me kind of crazy. He started with simple texts, then started coming home with “graphic novels”. I just let him do it. He was stuck on those for a bit, started getting interested in World Record books (which, again, lots of pictures and not much writing), and then…read a Roald Dahl book a day for two weeks. For whatever reason, the switch flipped.

Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.

I think it just comes in its own time if nurtured.

Edit: I really like what John Gotto (I think…he wrote a book called Dumbing Us Down) observed about literacy; for a long time it just developed naturally without much formal instruction. I had that in mind for our kid and am glad I did.

> Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.

This reminds me of the father-son scenes in Zen and the Art and of Motorcycle Maintenance. The narrator—the father—reads Walden to his son, who is just at the edge of being able to understand it. That causes a lot of Q&A between father and son that the narrator initially finds annoying. But then he realizes that Walden reads better this way.