Starting Phono-Graphix!......Would love any helpful hints...

Hi Laura, You might try this old post at Parenting LD . From Sue J it’s titled Try this and I’ll be at Net Haven tonight …. It’s for a child who’s resisting studying but I think it’s good advice to start out. Good Luck.

with my 8-1/2yo daughter, who was reading on a preschool level and coming home from 2nd grade telling me she was stupid because she couldn’t read and all of the other kids could.

The best advice I can give you is to just start. You don’t have to do it perfectly for it to work, and you learn a lot just by doing it.

We made the most progress the week my daughter was home from school during Easter vacation and we did RR for about 40 minutes 5 days in a row. However, we had many lessons that were just 20 minutes long (either because she couldn’t handle more, or because I couldn’t handle more).

Mary

I’ve taught older kids to read an doften they start with a lot of resistance. This is hard — and they *know* it should be easy. Many of
them are absolutely terrified that they are simply too stupid to do this. Kids who don’t “play with sounds” easily are totally confused
by being asked to say “pim” without the “p.” They *rely* on their grasp of meaning. THey don’t hear the words as a bunch of sounds
— their brains go straight to the meaning.

What I do in this situation is what I learned to do when teaching terrified kids to swim. First earn their trust that I am not going to ask
them to do anything they can’t do, for as long as that takes. This means keeping this reading thing ridiculously easy, easy, easy — but
*doing* it for 15 minutes a day. OF course the trouble is that none of it is easy right away… but I would just have her build simple
three letter words — all wiht the short a sound — and read them back to you… and work on a flash card deck with the letter sounds
and 10 basic sight words. So a lesson would go something like this:
1. Go over letter sounds. Make a deck of cards for the first column of the stuff on p. 49 of RR — b c d f g h j k l m n p r s t v w.
She may or may not know the rule for the two sounds of c and g — do everybody a favor and take the time to teach it now ;) For
these cards, just have her say “/k/ or /s/” for c, and /g/ or /j/ for g.
See how fast she can get these sounds out. If she’s got them already, great! (You can tell her that some of my high schoolers didn’t.)
If she knows all hte first column, then include the second column — I would skip “ce” myself because I wouldn’t want to toss in silent
e just yet (the answers to the sounds has the sound being just the s sound).
2. have her build words *just wiht the short a sound.* The short vowels are the hardest things to hear the difference between (most
of *us* can’t really discern between short i and sort e) so this way she doesn’t have to worry about the vowel. Tell her she’s going to
build five words for you so whether it takes five minutes or an hour… hey, that’s her choice. (though if this is very hard for her, cut it
to three :)).
It’s best to start with “Stretchable” sounds — so make the first words man, van, Sam. If she has trouble hearing which letters they
are, stretch out the sounds so she can hear them. Then you can stick some of the “stopping” sounds at the end — sat and sap and
map and mat.
If you go to http://www.auburn.edu/~murraba/ you’ll find some really neat ideas for getting kids to “tune into the sounds of words,”
and at http://www.auburn.edu/~murraba/spellings.html some really fun key words to help remember the sounds for the letters” (scroll
down to “list of phonemes, spellings…” for the link from his front page) IF you’re not careful you might get sillya nd actually get her
smiling… I know that seems unlikely .
Then third I’d just go through a short deck of, say, five sight words. GO through them three times.

Another really good idea is to keep a notebook so that she can see her work and her progress. Have a three ring binder in sections.
The first section is for the word building. IF she uses manipulatives for the letters, then you can copy the words she builds there; you
can also have her practice writing the words and building as she writes. YOu can even make tiles or use plastic refrigerator magnet
letters — I’d give her a choice of using those “baby letters” since that’s what she’ll say or writing out the words… but I”d have her use
the letters for at least some of it since it will free up her brain to be thinking of the sounds instead of how to write the letters.
The second section is for the sight words — when she gets one right, first time, perfect, put it on the list and give it a check. When
she gets five checks in a row (Five days in arow) give it a star and she can skip it for a week.

… okay, have I overwhelmed you? I’ll be at the Thrusday night chat at www.net-haven.net tonight (thursday) at 9 eastern, 8 central
time if you want to ask questions or just tell me I’m nuts :)

Hi Sue!
Thanks for all the great suggestions!!!!! Right now it all seems like a huge goal, but somehow we’re going to plod along. I did start him yesterday at the beginning (even though I wanted to move forward to the next level!). Even though he knows his individual letter sounds quite well, he did have a couple of instances where he had to catch himself on “g” and “j” so I drilled those.

Overall my son is very good with phonetics (letter sounds), and has known them well for quite awhile now.

But he is a very slow reader. Also, the exceptions and long vowels get him so confused that it makes progressing very difficult. He has a tendency to start guessing words.

Again, Thanks! :-)

Mary,
Your post is encouraging! Thanks for sharing what has worked best and the time frame you used.

You might want to wander to
http://www.resourceroom.net/OGLists/index.asp
and look at the articles on fluency (the newest one and “getting up to speed.”)

Some people don’t need those short vowels separated out (but I generally start with just one because of my ground rule that it’s better to do too well and go forward than to try something and fail and have to go back — you end up with lots more *forward* momentum the first way). I would try a “letterbox lesson” wiht three-sound words, then four-sound words with the blends at the beginning (stop, slip, Fred) then at the end (melt, salt, walk, lunch - I have a neat tile set with tiles for things like ch which are pictures of just one sound). Technically “salt” and “walk” aren’t short-a vowel words, but it’s one of those things that many folks don’t even notice.

IF these are all easy, still take a few days to go through it — actually, it’s great if that’s easy because then the main attention is being paid to learning this relatively new process.
There’s another neat activity that is like “letterbox” but a little less taxing on the fingers, and that’s “finger spelling.” It’s part of Jane Fell Greene’s Language! program… here’s a dialogue version:
Finger Stretching
(ideas are from Dr. Jane Fell Green, Language! curriculum — and if you have ever wondered “gee, why do they say you need so much training for this” — this is just one of *many* strategies and it’s a lot better to see it than to read it!)

To prepare for finger stretching:
Use the hand you write with.. Hold your palm facing you, and make a loose fist.

Teacher: Let’s finger stretch the sounds in stamp. Say stamp.
Student: “Stamp”.
Teacher: Say the first sound in the word stamp, /s/, while moving your thumb out of the fist and holding it straight out. (Teacher demonstrates.)
Student: /S/. (She stretches her thumb as she says the sound.)
Teacher: Keep your thumb out and say the second sound in the word, /t/, while moving your index finger out of your fist and holding it straight out.
Student: /t/. (She stretches her index finger as she says the sound.)
Teacher: Keep both your thumb and index finger stretched out and say the third sound in the word, /a/, while moving your middle finger out of the fist and holding it straight out.
Student: /a/. (She stretches her middle finger as she says the sound.)
Teacher: What is the next sound in stamp?
Student: /M/.
Teacher: Good. Say the sound /m/ while stretching out ring finger.Keep the thumb, index finger, and middle finger stretched out, too. (Teacher demonstrates.)
Student: /M/. (She stretches her ring finger as she says the sound.)
Teacher: What is the last sound in stamp?
Student: /P/.
Teacher: Good. Continue to stretch out your thumb, index finger, middle finger, and ring finger. Now say /p/ while putting up your pinkie. (Teacher demonstrates.)
Student: /P/. (She stretches out her pinkie as she says the sound.)

You have finger stretched all the sounds in the word stamp! How many sounds are in the word? Five!

Footnote: Of course, it goes much faster than this. You just say the whole word, then you say each sound while putting up a new finger and drawing the hand across the midpoint of your body from left to right.

Then you can go to multisyllable words and leave the boxes behind for a while