PG visual memory for advanced code

My son has a lot of the same problems as yours. We did a PG intensive after first grade in Orlando. We have been using PG since then, including this year with a PG trained resource teacher. He still does not easily read at grade level a year and a half later.

I have no magical solutions but I can tell you what we’ve done or are thinking about doing to help. My son now reads fluently at a second grade level (he is in third) and can manage third grade material, although it is still a fair amount of work for him. For example, he read five pages from his science text last night to me—but he was exhausted afterwards—there are still too many words he can not automatically recall (sometimes we alternative pages and on a really bad night I read it to him).

We’ve done a lot of reading. The repeated exposure to patterns does help. We also have gone back and done the advanced code again. This, combined with him getting the same material at school this year, has helped also. I also quiz him a lot. I noticed his teacher gives them tests on the advanced code so I started having him make a list of all the ways this sound (let’s say o e) could be represented. I also try for a higher level of mastery than the PG people suggest
before moving on. Otherwise, I have found through experience it is a complete waste of time because he promptly forgets it. I also just keep cycling back to old material.

Last year I started directly attacking my son’s weak visual memory for letters by using Lindamood’s Seeing Stars. You can use it with PG with no problem. I just bought the manual and found it pretty easy to use, although you can also take courses in it. I found that my son was able to learn to visualize letters (and I was able to teach him!!) We didn’t get very far however because I also realized that he didn’t have the sound to letter correspondence for single letters down solid. So we went back to that—actually using the PACE program which has a lot of drill in it. We have not yet returned to Seeing Stars—although that is my intention.
I also know other kids with this profile who have benefited from doing PACE and following it up with Master the Code—which is their reading program. It is a more drill like format than PG and PACE helps develop visual memory–although it isn’t as specific to letters as Lindamood’s Seeing Stars is.
My son was pretty burned out by the auditory processing work in PACE (he has CAPD) and it just didn’t seem like a realistic option for us at the time.

Beth

Excuse me, lots of people are in the 2%, more than 2% even. Many LD youngsters have significant memory issues, merely teaching the child the “code” with a reputable program is not enough. The child may require many, many more repetitions with the skills and words taught than the program actually seems to allow for or suggest, so if you proceed too quickly, they forget, mix up patterns, and have massive difficulties decoding multisyllable words. I don’t think any program is going to be a “miracle,” but it will certainly help.

Anitya:

My daughter has also had PG, but she is still having difficulty with spelling (actually both of my daughters!). I agree that the program developers encourage you to move fast. I don’t think this works for all children. The other problem I see is that PG suggests teaching all of the spellings for sounds at one time for older children. For younger children you can teach them fewer. My younger daughter had PG at a young age and I only introduced her to a few spellings at once. Then last summer she went through much of the advanced code with a tutor where she introduced all of the spellings.

She still has difficulty with spelling. In fact, I now have two daughters doing poorly in both spelling and writing. And yes, both of my girls have “massive” difficulty decoding multisyllable words.

I’m not sure how I am going to proceed from here, but I wanted to respond to your post.

I do think PG is an excellent program for developing phonemic awareness (its main strength) and it does have other strengths as well.

Margo

check out Newsweek this week, article called The Right Way to Read, all about how for kids who might struggle to read later in elementary school, intervention at age 3 and 4 may have been critical, especially kids in inner city environements, but not exclusively,

if, for kids who cannot process sounds, and intervention does not occur until late 2nd grade or after, we are now talking about a kid who has missed about 4 years of code,

“fixing” this is not going to happen overnight, these kids have years and years to make up, while other kids were seeing and using the code, these kids were not,

when first grade teachers tell parents to wait and see if the kid reads later, give it time etc, this is deadly for these kids,

if a kid is not reading by the middle of 1st grade, start then to help the child,

unless as a parent, you suspected something earlier, then start early to help the child,

PG works well for this, help the child at as young of an age as possible,

the article is pushing for help in preschool for kids who do not have good auditory sound processing and visual processing,

dave

Surely, the program is fine, but I sometimes get the impression that some of the P-G folks trivialize the challenge that dyslexics face learning to read. It is made to appear that if you just teach it right, the child will be fixed. This works when the child has been poorly taught, but not all disabled readers have been poorly taught.

Spelling may never be good, too many memory difficulties for dyslexics and little to compensate with. However, this is one area where I will state that IF we totally refused to let dyslexics write until they could spell and if we taught them systematic strategies to learning to spell (see the website called Reading Genie for good suggestions, it is found doing a Google search), then they wouldn’t spend years practicing words incorrectly. The difficulty is in making the discriminations correctly, early enough. Nondyslexic children can begin writing early and do progress through stages in their spelling, particularly under the guidance and instruction of good teaching.

Dave, our teachers have used good programs for 6+ years now. We are getting fewer referrals to special ed. So, we have wiped out the dysteachia group who used to land in special ed. (at my site). However, the group I am getting now does have significant learning disabilities. I have one who has been with us all along and she is one of the lowest, most disabled readers I have ever worked with. She has major visual and other processing issues and really very, very little to use for compensating. Others are mostly learning the code, so to speak, but they do tend to forget more than nondisabled peers and they have fluency issues. My current focus is exploring whether or not special ed. teachers CAN fix the fluency problem (you know, the ones who can only read 25-50 or so words per minute, even if accuracy is 100%). My experiences thus far, using two fluency programs that offer full coverage of essentially all that research tells us about developing fluency, are not highly encouraging………this competency is not changing much in the several children who demonstrate the most severe fluency problems. And, even with much good teaching from classroom teachers and myself, I still have those students who have tremendous difficulty with the multi-syllabic words. They can do when I am there, and have for 3 years, but when meeing longer words in text, they look, grab a couple of letters here and there, then make something up, usually with the sequence scrambled, or they sound out then drop a medial syllable because they don’t have the working memory to hang on to all of the syllables and do the blending too. I really am frustrated with well meaning educators who trivialize the process of teaching dyslexics to read.

Now, I don’t know what might happen if we got them at age 3 and started with phonemic awareness exercises and practice with segmenting and blending. This needs research and probably can be done.

PG’s approach to spelling (scratch spelling) requires that you have pretty intact visual processing so that you can recognize which of several patterns is correct. Some kids can learn to read well using PG but need a more explicit approach for spelling. One approach I know a number of people have had success with is Sequential Spelling by AVKO. I ordered it and started working with my son with it but stopped after a few weeks. It really requires that a student be at about a third grade reading level and at the time my son was only at a second.

My son can’t spell worth beans either and I do plan on returning to it.

Beth

What is about you being there versus not being there that makes such a big difference with multi-syllable words for your students? My son tends to get the first syllable correct and then guess at the rest unless it is a word he has seen it a lot. If I force him to decode the word, he usually can do it—including remembering all the syllables.. Is this the same kind of pattern you see with your students?

Beth

i think you have hit the nail on the head anitya, age may be such an important factor for t he dyslexics that at this point in time and research, i do not think we have enough information about how important age and remediation is,

and the tough cases as you have said are everywhere, the total assault of code that these kids need is probably unreasonable to expect in a normal classroom setting,

and whether fluency can be attained is something we all struggle with when working with disabled readers,

and the hardest part of all of it, is that our curriculum is heavily dependent on text, and for kids where text is hard, their school day is very long and very tiring,

i have one boy now for tutoring, he is in 2nd grade and a severe dyslexic, he goes to a charter school and his day runs from 7:30 to 5:00 each each day,

two nights a week he swims at night, and one day he goes to horse back riding lessons, yikes, how can this child possibly ever get the help he needs, his mom and dad struggle with the code themselves and his teacher has no idea how to help him,

will he ever become fluent, not at this rate, he has gone through PG and whatever the school is using, but the time that this child needs is just not going to happen,

so i agree with all of your posts, PG is too new for any long term studies and the age factor is now only being discussed for the first time,

how to find future dsylexics at age 3 seems to hold most promise,

dave

The main problem with even identifying children in Kindergarten with Dyslexia is having reliable tests to distingusih it early, and having enough schools committed to testing children for it.

Also, there are even teachers with a special education background within the public school system (at least at our school) that don’t even know all the characteristics, or could even identify children with dyslexia. As far as I know there is not one identified “dyslexic” child at our school. But there is a population of students with reading “difficulties” who attend “reading intervention.”

And, when I questioned the resource specialist about what program was being used for reading intervention, I was told that they don’t use any particular program. I don’t know if it’s better to use a certain one over a variety of materials, but it seems to me that there would be more consistency in using a specific remediation program.

Hi Beth,
Thanks for sharing that info about AVCO! Do they have a website? Also, do you know anything about Word Workshop? I had read that it was good for helping with multi-syllable reading.

Here it is. This is a low budget operation—they don’t take credit cards and you have to call them, as I recall. They billed me and I sent them a check. I also got their typing program, although I haven’t used that either yet!!!

http://www.spelling.org/

As far as I can see, AVKO offers a new slant on Orton-Gillingham approaches and methodology. That’s good! If one orders all the materials, it can become a bit pricey.

One of the ways that OG approaches differ from PG is in the treatment of consonants. PG teaches all the consonant patterns as they occur whereas OG approaches break the syllables between consonants. For example, use the words “bullet” and “comprehend.” Underline all the vowels in the word, then look at the numbers of consonants between vowels. If there are only two consonants, one usually breaks the word between them. Thus, bul/let is composed of two closed syllables, syllables in which the vowel if followed by a consonant. In accented syllables, the vowel is short, and in unaccented syllables it takes the schwa sound. In com/pre/hend, the first and last syllables are closed but the middle one is open (vowel not followed by a consonant) and the vowel represents the long sound. If I’ve keyed these correctly, the underlined vowels should be evident. If I haven’t, it will show up as a mess (Chuckle). Knowing about the six kinds of syllables and how to divide words into them, will usually enable a child to approximate the pronunciation of most words. S/he then decides if that word is in his oral vocabulary and works from there to gain the correct pronunciation. Some words as camel would be divided as ca/mel suggesting that it be pronounced cay-mel. Since this isn’t a familiar word, the student tries dividing it as cam/el and discovers that this is a word s/he knows.

This is far to short a communication to adequately discuss the issue but I think that becoming familiar with OG methods and multi-sensory teaching can be a great help for some of these students. Grace at

Apparently this chatboard doesn’t pick up on html coding. I was trying to divide bul/let (two closed syllables) and com/pre/hend (syllables closed - open - closed) with all the vowels underlined. The last example was ca/mel (open - closed as cay-mel) vs. cam/el (two closed syllables). Oh well, I tried.

I just ordered the Sequential Spelling 1-7 which I think came with a workbook. I also ordered the Keyboarding program. I am sure my bill was less than $100. One could also just order Sequential Spelling I for a fairly nominal amount.

I thought this would be useful with my older daughter as well so I ordered the whole program.

Beth

Dear jk,
I think that it is premature to think that your son is the ‘2%’that hasn’t gained the skills to read. You have said that he can segment and blend, now he has to work on code knowledge. It sounds to me that you need to review the advanced code and do this with having the chart in front of him and show him the similarities in the choices for the sound. For example, when I review the sound er, I ask the kids about the vowels, they say a/e/i/o/u/ and I tell them that they have to add an r for the sound/er/. I then add /ear/ , /urr/orr/ r/ and /re/. I then ask them what other sound is represented by /or/ and they say or, then /ar/ and they say /r/, and then /ear/ for the sound ear. I hope you can understand this, it is hard to write. Take each sound and show him the similarities. Are you listening to him read? You should be and help him correct every error that he makes. I feel that error correction is probably the best part of PG. When I have finished the program, and start the kids in their literature books, when they start reading, it is as if I haven’t taught them anything. All of their insecurities and bad habits come back as they read. Then I start error correcting and they start improving by using the information that they have been taught. I slow them down when they guess at a word and they sound it out. If they forget the sound that corresponds with the sound picture, I question them, just jog their memory. If they still don’t remember, I tell them the sound. You have to give your child time to practice by reading. I like to look at PG as giving the skills to kids and then they have to read inorder to improve those skills. Having the skills works fast but improving them takes time. You haven’t said how old your son is. I would highly recommend that you not try another program until you give your son time to practice what he has learned. Guided practice with your son will be what he needs now. By the way, the 2% that PG didn’t help, I believe needed vision therapy. If you need help with error correction, email me personally with your phone number. I will call you and help you with the program. I never use all of my minutes on my phone service so I don’t mind calling long distance. By the way, how old is your son?