In my view, restlessness and distractibility are part of being a child.  Children grow out of this fairly quickly.  Unfortunately, here in the U.S., we start reading instruction too early for most children.  This migration of reading instruction to ever younger ages should be seen for what it is—an act of desperation.  If your child can focus on video games for 30 minutes in a row, he can almost certainly learn to read in the right environment.  Five-to-seven year olds were not meant to be cooped up in cinder-block prisons listening to professorial lectures on the seven ways of spelling the sound “awe.”  For the curious: awe, awl, all, haul, dog, bought, & caught.

Distractibility Inside Reading Groups

Even when children aren’t daydreaming out of boredom, they may not be paying attention to the right word at the right moment.  In old-fashioned reading groups, each child has a book in his lap and is trying to “follow along.”  Consider the sentence, “The dog chased the cat.”  An attentive child may get “distracted” by sounding out the word dog, just as the child who is reading for the group says cat.  The same thing can happen when the teacher points at the word cat and says “cat.”  If your child is paying attention to a prior word in the list when the teacher says cat, nothing useful happens inside your child’s memory.

The Rails method minimizes problems of this sort by making words appear one at a time on a shared screen.  When a new word appears, the eyes of your child (or all the children in a reading group) are automatically drawn to the next word to be read by dint of an ocular reflex hardwired during evolution.  Your child will be focused on the right word at the right time because ignoring movement in one’s environment is dangerous.

A related thing happens with pictures.  When I was 6, I found myself in an advanced reading group.  The assistant teacher was called away by the other teacher due to a spill or something.  I had been struggling with some word, unable to sound it out.  The other members of the reading group tried to help me.  They pointed out that I didn’t have to sound out the word: They said I should just look at the picture.  I felt stupid at the time.  Today I know you can’t learn to read by analyzing pictures.  That’s why all pictures in Rails appear after the corresponding word has been read correctly.