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and I retrained my dyslexic, illiterate, public-school-ruined fifth grader

It's interesting what is happening --- a lot of kids appear to read, they read word by word by word and they were being taught to read since preschool days --- but by the third grade it's apparent they cannot read with comprehension. They can read the paragraph but cannot figure out what it meant. It would be good for many to just start over and be retrained.

reply to: ",,,cannot read with comprehension. They can read the paragraph but cannot figure out what it meant."

That can certainly be a serious problem, for sure!

It relates very well to what I pointed out about thinking of a word as a concept or an idea - what good is it if you can sound out every single word, but during that feat, not be able to derive or remember the ideas the writer was trying to convey?

I have seen that so many times with kids - since they can sound out words, it is believed that they "know how to read".

Reading is actually a very complex skill, where the writer's ideas are reconstructed in the reader's mind. It serves very little purpose if there is nothing more than recognition of individual words. And that is what "phonics" is all about.