Struggling readers at 1st are often lacking in both sight words and confidence. Find easy books where he can read some parts, like Piggie and Gerald books. Read the same book over and over so he can memorize it. Quickly help him out with any word over 4 letters. School generally does a good job teaching the phonics and spelling, but schools typically can't provide students with enough time spent actually reading and learning sight words. As a result many kids in K-2 struggle with words that don't "follow the rules".

100% agree about not forcing, but you can gently encourage and expose kids to a wide variety of books to see what motivates them. Sounds like this is what you guys did and I'm glad it works out. I think we book lovers sometimes forget that we don't actually love ALL books, on the contrary its really specific authors and genres that are responsible for our motivation. It can be very difficult for kids to find the joy of reading when they are limited to graded readers and other phony school books.

I work for a reading tutoring company and I can assure you public schools do not expect every child to be reading novels in Kinder lol. Instruction in K-1 focuses mostly on letter-sound correspondence, phonics, sight words, and spelling .

Correction: mindfulness training vastly increases SELF-REPORTED focus and emotional regulation...

Boy even the most minor event is "news" these days.