Teaching Boys to Read with less Tears

Boys have, in general because I like to make broad generalizations as a hobby, no desire to please or impress you. My friends with girls have the ability to act disappointed, and their daughters will be all sad and actually try to do better next time. This is so foreign to me I don't even know how it would work in practice.

There's two things I think work very well with boys: Headsprout and Comic books.

Headsprout is basically Rosetta Stone but for learning how to read. You just say "You get to play 10 minutes of a video game after you finish your Headsprout" and then you watch them to make sure they are following along and they'll pick up some basic skills. The real magic is after they've learned how to "blend" (combine letter sounds into a word, as opposed to "sight reading" a word). Then Headsprout pumps them all the way up through reading comprehension and gets them into about fifth grade reading level effortlessly.

Click here to sign up: https://www.headsprout.com/

Let me sell you on the 100 bucks with this comment: Headsprout has infinite patience and you don't. As long as you make the child do it every day, it works well.

The second trick that works well is comic books. Not the newer comic books, which are extremely adult in both topics and art. But the older ones that date from even before our generation. The originals. Because they share characters with the modern movies your kids are already aware of them and interested, and because they date from before it was OK to show kissing on TV they are all safe to buy your five year old.

"I'm old. My webs smell like prunes and irony."

Suggestions:
Complete Calvin And Hobbes (Super effective but WILL turn your kid a bit into a monster)
Older X-Men Books Are Always Good
Older Spider Man is Still Great (Don't forget Spider Man is created because his dad dies, like Batman, so you may want to avoid the very first ones)

They even make comics about all the Greek Gods, which are quite good:
Zeus

Once they can read you get them Joss Whedon's X-Men books, which are amazing for both adults and kids and probably the best comic books ever created (he also created Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, directed Avengers, etc.):
Book 1 + Book 2