Teaching a Six Year Old Engineer to Read

Teach your child to READ in 100 Easy Lessons. That's the name of one of my favorite books. I've taught 3 of my children to read using this method with great success - they are all very good readers.

But, now I'm trying to teach Jacob. He's six and not reading yet. He understands the concepts, knows the sounds and will sound out words when coerced. He can even read whole sentences and complete stories when properly motivated.

Therein lies my problem. We are on Lesson 70, and I have yet to figure out how to properly motivate this child. 

He is an engineer, a builder, a scientist... he is also a secret ninja who regularly travels to China to train at ninja school via the time and space traveling device that is in his lab that has a secret trap door with recognition software that detects if anyone other than him tries to enter and will detonate and blow us all to pieces if we try to access it. AND, on these trips to China, he also visits Julia; the love of his life, the prettiest girl in the world, and the girl he plans to marry.

Yes, this is the world that Jacob lives in, and I try to understand it.

Sitting down for 20 minutes to sound out one letter at a time to make a word and doing this same task over and over again, to make another word and another word and another word... and when you look ahead in the book, it's ALL just MORE WORDS! This is not nearly as exciting as the rest of his life.

It's my goal to finish one lesson per day. Some days, I succeed, simply by being the most strong willed, and bugging him so that he can't concentrate on anything else until he does what I want. Other days, he is the more strong willed and I give up. Some days, I come up with creative ideas, like "You can have one M&M every time you read a sentence." (He was sick of them by the fifth one) Or "Reading Jacks" which I thought was a terrific idea and worked really well for one day.

Reading Jacks is a game where he reads a sentence, then counts the words in the sentence (something he loves to do anyway - he likes to know how many words he has read and how many are left to go), then he does that number of jumping jacks before reading the next sentence. This worked great for one lesson.

Now, when I suggest it, he says "I hate that game"

Every day it's a struggle, and I start off the day thinking that I will get it over with early in the morning and then we'll both feel better about it. But, then he gets deeply involved in building and imaginative play, so I keep putting it off and we end up in a battle by mid-afternoon because we allow media time (this is tv shows/video games, etc) from 3pm to 5pm, but only for children who have all of their schoolwork done. If Jacob hasn't finished his reading lesson then he doesn't get to play. This makes him angry, but does not motivate him to do the lessons.

If this was any other subject, I think I would just wait until he's a little older. But, this is learning to read. I feel like it is necessary and the longer we wait on this, the harder it will be for him to learn other subjects that require reading.

So, I'm curious. How did you teach your children to read? How old were they? How long would you wait if your child couldn't/wouldn't read? How far would you go to make it happen?