Down Syndrome update

J. is a delight to have as one of my students. He is 8 years old, in grade one at the local Christian School. As far as I can see, he is at his grade level for reading. I have some grade one students who can't read as well as he can and some that are way ahead of him.
He loves to play games and attempt to sing songs. He loves to move to music. One of his strengths is to memorize things, but the weakness being he may not necessarily understand them. J. is very good at understanding the rules of the games so that makes it very easy to work with him.
J. does not like to print or work in his book but I have found that stickers and candy are a great motivator. We are working on printing his alphabet, there are 3 pages of letters. We do one line on each page and he gets to pick a sticker for each page.
J. quite often say "I'm done" when he has had enough of an activity or game, especially if he doesn't quite understand what we are doing. For example, identifying a 'sitting' or 'standing' clown in a word. I usually try to get him to finish the project or activity that we are working on so that he can accomplish the goals that he is working on without quitting. If I give him a word such as "kit" or "Kite" and ask him to identify sitting or standing he would get about 50% right. At that level I am really not sure if he is just getting half right by guessing.
We are near the end of his first year in Fun Family Phonics and he has mastered the blends completely. I am confident that he not only can read them but he understands the concept as well. He also has a good grasp of Hairy Humphries Carosel. We are still working on that, he can read most of words but with a sound like "gh" having so many different sounds it is difficult for him. As we use the words in many different games he ends up memorizing them. For example "cough" with "gh" sounding like "f".
J. plans to return in Sept. and we will begin by reviewing the blends, clowns, and Hairy Humphrey. I have been spending 3 or 4 tutoring session on each lesson sheet. I may have to shorten the time spent on each lesson or he will spend 3 years here instead of 2. I have spoken to his mother about this and we will assess the situation before Christmas and decide if I should move faster and just complete the course.
I try to read a short story to him at each tutoring session and ask him some questions to see if he understands the story. This is not a favorite activity for him but I feel that it will be beneficial in the long run.
J. is still quite negative and very often will say "no" when I suggest an activity, if I say "yes" this is what we are doing he is also very quick to co-operate. Sometimes J. needs a very "firm" suggestion but I have never had a problem teaching him.

A Game evolved
I had a boy in grade 2, it was getting harder and harder to keep his attention on phonics. He thought the games were boring. I decided to use a bit more candy to keep him going. After we sang a group of songs e.g. #7, 8 and 9, I would then quiz him on the phonetic sound. I would show him one of the teaching pictures and ask him to say the sound. For some of them I would use a white board and make a word, such as fair or deer. If he got it right on the first try, I would give him a gummy worm. He started to get way too many candies so I decided that I would take one of his candies back if he got it wrong. Before we started the game I told him that he would end up with 5 gummy worms, we would keep playing until he got that many. He loves the game and his learning has greatly improved.

I like to use different methods of reading the "stories" from FFP. I used two different colours of felt pens and wrote out the words in a size to fit my story board. I then gave one colour to a couple of children and another to others. They reconstruct the story on the board, using the typed copy as reference.