Confusion with b/p

This is so much easier to show you than to use words to tell you how to do it. But you can have him use his right hand to give him a visual cue for his b and p confusion…Have him use his right hand with his thumb up and if he does it right it looks like a b have him swing his hand up in the air and say, balls fly up in the air. Then for p have him turn his fisted hand with the thumb going downward with the top of his hand facing him and if he does it right it should resemble a p and as he moves his hand downward he can say pigs go down in the mud…I learned that from Susan Barton of Bright Solutions for Dyslexia..enjoy..

Hi Ann,

Do you have a good toy store, or better yet an
educational store nearby?

I would buy some hands on letters.
Some come with directional arrows embedded
in the plastic.
The idea is to use touch to help your son really
feel the letters. Using the touch sense.

Another great tool are Wicky Sticks, these are
wax covered string. Your son can manipulate
them into the letters he is trying to distinguish.

Or he can pick up the plastic letters and trace
them with his finger, match them to the letter
in the word and see if that helps him distinguish
them.

Another trick is to make a memory trick.
With my son it is b/d.
Think of the word ‘bed’, how it makes a
bed b––-d and /b/ comes first in the alphabet
and /d/ comes second, the head and the foot of the bed…

Other tricks are to trace in sand, trace in soupy jello,
make letter cookies, frost them and eat them.
Make up a song if he has musical talents about bubbles go
up and pee goes down (just like, ahem, it does in the commode…)

Anne

it only works if I use my left hand!

Mary

I’ve found it really helps to have children trace the letters on texture while having them say the letter name and the sound it represents. I’ve been working with a little girl who’s had a terrible time with b/p this year and it’s finally beginning to click after six months of work. You can make cards similar to the ones you find at: . This is the kind of work I did with my little gal. Grace

you are right it is the left hand…but this works for d and q on the right hand…and p/b on the left…but that is another story…I am going to bed before I do some more typo’s

A technique with a good success rate — *ignore* the visual pattern which is confusing; in fact it is a good practice to do this with eyes closed at times. Teach the child how to form the letters in correct flowing print, making all letters top-to-bottom and left-to-right, circles counterclockwise for preference and clockwise only when required by the flow, as few pen lifts as possible. Also note top, middle, and bottom positions. Then the formation of b is start at the top line, pull down to the bottom line, slide back up almost to the middle, and clockwise circle. The formation of p is start at the middle line, pull down to the bottom and then past it to make a tail, slide back up all the way almost to the middle, and then finish with a clockwise circle. The formations are similar but b starts higher and has a long draw and a quick circle, whereas p starts lower and has a descent into the tail and long slide up to the circle. Feel this by drawing in the air — I’ve never used drawing in sand as other posters have suggested but it sounds like a great idea — and do it with eyes closed and concentrate on the feeling.

nt

nt

First, thank you to everyone who has responded. I will try the suggestion from Pattim for the 3rd grade student especially and see if this motion can help him with the confusion. I should have explained a bit further—this does not occur when this student writes (especially not in cursive!), only when he reads. You can listen as he struggles to get his mouth in position for either /b/ or /p/—trying to decide which in this particular case, he should use. If you asked him which letter was which, he knows—or which stands for the /p/ sound, he knows. It’s in the context of reading that the letters flip on him—extremely annoying to him. Thanks again for all the suggestions. Although I don’t have a lot of time to write on the board, I do follow the conversations and feel like I know some of you. Hang on to the rest of you teachers out there—only about six more weeks!
Ann

Dear Ann:

It is understandable that your student could have problems with recalling the correct sound for b/p when reading. The b and p are produced very similarly with the mouth. They are both what are called “explosives”. The difference between the two is the (sound of) b is voiced and the (sound of) p does not use the voice box. You might have your student practice producing the sounds with two fingers on the voice box when making the b sound, and with the palm in front of the mouth when making the p sound. Then when he encounters a “b word” or a “p word” he can use the fingers or palm to help trigger recall of the right sound. Sometimes just moving the hand toward the head will trigger recall, and after a short while it isn’t needed at all or only occasionally.

Hope this helps,

L. Starr

There isn’t one…but I suppose that the kid can hitchhike his way to d in Dairy Queen to find the Ball’s that are hidden with the pigs eating in the mud outside the Dairy Queen…and then put his thumb down to make the q for the queen.

sometimes doing a hand movement gets the message to the brain quicker - if he gets in the habit of making the hand signal (for b or p) while he makes the right sound for htat letter, then when he sees it an dhas that bit of confusion, he can do the same thing and there will be a more automatic connection, and with any luck just the memory of thae motion will help the right sound come out.

I *hope* you are joking. As a person with directionality confusion (but no problems reading, thanks) I find this kind of “help” to be absolutely disastrous. We start with a small problem, remembering left or right, up or down. I can figure this out given a little time to think, image, feel both my hands, etc. Now you add a long and complex story with a ton of distractors, and I am absolutely guaranteed never to remember the directions and also to get irritated and frustrated whenever I try to remember as my simple images get overlaid with pigs, mud, and ice cream.

The practice printing with directionality will usually feed back to the reading and prevent the “flips”, but it does take time. Work on the printing and forming the letters with eyes closed for a few weeks, and when he has trouble in reading have him trace the letter on his desk. In a month or two the flips should be greatly reduced. This works much better than the instant magic cures since it retrains the brain permanently.

victoria wrote:
>
> The practice printing with directionality will usually feed
> back to the reading and prevent the “flips”, but it does take
> time. Work on the printing and forming the letters with eyes
> closed for a few weeks, and when he has trouble in reading
> have him trace the letter on his desk. In a month or two the
> flips should be greatly reduced. This works much better than
> the instant magic cures since it retrains the brain
> permanently.

Not exactly for the “b/p” problem, but I had used a similar approach for my son’s “said” and “and” confusion.

I had asked him to “write” the “said” word with his finger on the book (the page was not “glossy” so it gave the tectile input). I had asked him to repeat the same writing with eyes closed. Since this was done- the mixed up had not happen yet…(he did not have that problem a year ago- it started this year- I have no idea - andy clues why?)

I made a mistake on the b/d and then I realized that d/q work on the other hand so I JOKINGLY got creative…do you do that sometimes??

Actually I disagree with you on using the body, stories and imaging to remember things.. My daughter uses her hands to remember b/d and it straightens her out when she get’s confused. In addition there was a fantastic article that I read on line about Mind mapping earlier this week that came from the BBC online news…It was about using mnemonics and other visual and auditory strategies to help people remember things. For instance, My daughter could not remember how to spell because…she now never mispells it because she says….Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants…

She has an incredible memory, has great phonemic awareness, knows the vowel circle and cognate pairs better than some college students in phonetics classes. She is a very phonetic speller, very ADD and doesn’t pay attention to the orthography used for correct spelling so we have to resort to mnemonics to remember difficult words.. In addition I use mnemonics to memorize neuroanatomy, blood vessels, etc so that I can pass my competency exams. I am very right brained and gifted and extremely ADD. Which explains my initial mess up with the balls and pigs debacle that started this whole thing… I definitely think outside the box, as I think in pictures and not in words.

Sorry if I offended you, I appreciate your contributions to the BB’s…..

I use mnemonics a lot too. I swear by them with some kids and with myself.

well, my post DID start with the sentence “I *hope* you’re joking” — I’m really not that unalert, but tones of voice and expressions don’t squeeze through these darned little wires too well.

Seriously, I keep seeing on the math board people oohing and aahing about how wonderful the “silly stories” technique in “Math Facts the Fun Way” is, and my blood runs cold. Most of my working career has been spent trying to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon, trying to undo the disastrous confusion caused by people who taught all sorts of fun things but neglected to teach kids to use their heads, apply logic or any kind of reasoning skill, or relate their work to the real world. There are ten million cute and funsy ideas out there, and you can be driven to tears with an eighteen-year-old failing college disastrously because their cute and funsy kindergarten approach is simply dead wrong. Yeah, sure, it got them through kindergarten, but it’s been a millstone around their necks ever since, and they will never ever drop that millstone because it was given them by beloved and loving (who cares if illiterate and innumerate?) Miss Jones.

One mnemonic or two - I do use Thirty Days and i before e and the alphabet song and Please Excuse - can be a help with an otherwise illogical system. Five hundred mnemonics (and that’s only forty a year or less than one a week) becomes a chaotic mass of confusion and leaves the poor kid with less than zero education, unable to pull the right game out of the mass and unable to look at a problem and apply thinking skills to it as the brain has been used only to memorize junk and never for logic. Many of my college math students have been literally unteachable because all they want is the next right formula, but they can’t remember or use the mass of formulas they have already covered, so they become less and less capable every semester instead of more.

Confusing “little words” like said and and is almost always a rush and guess problem. Kids want to “get through” a book, they are often rewarded for reading fast or for reading a large number of books, and they are often made fun of if they go slowly. So they learn to skip over all the small words and only look at the big ones. It’s a bad habit — I’m glad you’re catching it and working on it now, as this will save you a lot of trouble later. Rush and guess in the early grades turns into tears of frustration in middle school when detail reading and accuracy and multiple-choice tests with fine distinctions appear.