Good feedback on Great Leaps!!

Karen,

That’s terrific news! One thing sent a red flag up for me, though. if he is having difficulty with the phonics portion, it leads me to ask, what has he had to remediate decoding? That must be done or everything else will be hindered to a certain extent.

Janis

Janis, Thanks for waving the red flag - he is working with a tutor (once a week over the summer, but 2x per week during the school year) and gets some support at school with a reading specialist. He knows his phonics pretty accurately , but it seems less automatic. Just my observation. Testing has shown that he has high phonemic awareness and reading comp„ and yet low phoneme/grapheme (as measured on the WJIII) .

My follow up question for you is about the content of the work he is doing with the tutor. When we hired her all we knew about his LD was that he might be dyslexic and we should say “orton gillingham”. I know alot more about his deficits now, and I still believe OG is the way to go , but how do I know if what she is doing really is OG? My question is not a criticism of her - she’s definitely doing phonics work with him, and I think its helping. But I want to make sure we are getting the real thing! Thanks for any other info you can provide.

Karen,

Tell her you have a friend (me) who is researching reading programs and would like to know what specific materials she is using. :-) It is true that there are many different OG based programs. I’m sure some are better than others. Of course, she may be using pure OG. You have a right to know this…especially if you are paying for it!

I’ll tell you a little secret. I think Great Leaps is wonderful, too. But…I think it is okay to skip the phonics part and just do phrases and stories. My reason…because we have to read phrases and stories in real life. Never are we asked to read lines of disconnected phonemes! I just don’t see the benefit. Just wanted to mention that in case you’d like to skip that part especially since he has OG tutoring anyway.

Let me know what you find out about the tutoring!

Janis

Thank you, I can’t tell you how helpful it is to have an objective , uninvolved, knowledgable person to talk to about this.

I suspect she is using materials she has put together from years of experience. The underlying premise may be in line with OG, but I bet she’s not following a program. I think she works on sight words, phonics thru the use of games, and also reads back and forth with him. She also seems to have him take some dictation. I believe the games and dictation are organized to introduce specific letters or letter combos. in some sequence. I’m sure she’ll show me if I ask… I just want to know what I should be looking for in case something seems to be missing.

For example, its easy to describe what great leaps is. Anyone can do it if they follow the directions. Is OG that well defined, or is it broad enough that different tutors might give different looking lessons and still be providing true OG instruction? When a tutor says they are Orton certified, what does that really mean?

Thanks Janis, since you keep answering my questions I’ll just keep on asking! : )

I’m afraid I have to disagree with Janis. Without the phonics, the Great Leaps will come to a screeching halt. Then the student will be even more frustrated and will have to backtrack and re-do stuff they think they know, not a good idea. Now, if the student is getting good phonics elsewhere, as in OG book or teacher-made materials, no, you don’t have to duplicate, but you MUST get the phonics well somewhere in order to read independently.

I also tutor, and I also don’t follow one specific program. It is in general a *good* thing to find a tutor who is knowledgeble and flexible and who can tailor lessons to the student’s needs.
When you were told to insist on Orton-Gillingham, that advice was meant to steer you away form hope-and-guess teaching and from snake oil. Orton-Gillingham is a specific, detailed phionics-based program. If your tutor is using a strong phonics-based program and working in a planned step-by-step fashion, building up skills, and interrelating different areas (phonics, word reading, text reading, comprehension, spelling, and handwriting; phonics beyond single letters, including digraphs, vowel patterns, and alternate sounds for certain letters), then you have a real gem and you should be very happy.
As the old saying goes, the proof is in the pudding. If your child is showing a steady increase in reading skills and comprehension and writing skills, thank your lucky stars and don’t interfere. *Of course* you can ask what materials and methods are being used and a good tutor will be happy to tell you and show you, but if they’re working properly, the name on the box is unimportant. A bad tutor can waste just as much time and money with an OG book as with anything else, and a good tutor can make and adapt non-brand-name materials to fit your child’s needs.

nt

I am a brand new, emergency-certified, teacher and need help! Do you know of a good website for lessons in reading. I have seen SRA, but our district stresses balanced literacy. Where do I begin? Many of my students need phonics instruction and have not yet developed phonemic awareness, and have difficulty decoding words. Others have a hard time sequencing and with comprehension. Do you know where I can begin to find materials to match curriculum? This website has provided a lot of strategy info, but I need to find materials and methods to correlate with curriculum. Please help!!

First, “balanced literacy” seems in many cases to be the latest code word for filling the time with every fad that comes down the pike. The bad news is that your students are probably very confused. The good news is that you can justify almost anything under this umbrella, so you can invent a good program and use it.

Free programs from websites are likely to be rather limited. You need an organized sequential well-planned program. Your kids need it anyway, and as a new teacher you need it too.
For phonics, I have had good success with “Check and Double Check” phonics workbooks from Scholar’s Choice. The only warning is that you dio ALL the lessons, in order, and you do them ORALLY (silent phonics is a contradiction in terms — phonics deals with sounds!!) This is quite inexpensive, about five dollars American per student book and probably you can get a school discount on that. I usually start most students at Book 1 — six months or so for Grade 1, two months review for higher grades. Better Grade 1 students can do half of Book 2 as well; higher grade students can do Books 1 and 2 and sometimes part of 3 in a year.
Many people here swear by “Reading Reflex” which is a teacher’s guide that you can buy for under twenty dollars, and then you handmake the materials needed. When it comes to handmaking class sets, you would probably be better to buy something.
For reading books, there are good series but too expensive to buy on your own. (If you have a school budget, get back to me and this board for suggestions!) However, almost all schools have a book closet. Hiding in this closet are probably two or three or even more series of books at your grade level. Sure, the covers are worn and you may need a little tape, but there’s loads of material and it doesn’t cost you a cent. Get the key and search a bit. Be sure the content and presentation of the books doesn’t make you gag. But if the content is OK, any limited vocabulary book can be used to teach reading once the phonics base is there — that’s the wonderful thing about really teaching reading, that the kids can read anything! You can also set up a class library using stuff from the book closet and finds from the local used book stores — just keep to a reasonably limited vocabulary to start
Now, if you get a good phonics book (and the workbooks I mentioned also include handwriting/printing, vocabulary, spelling and some simple games) and at least *two* reading series or maybe even three, some library books, and you do some creative writing, you have a balanced reading program that you can justify with a smile when the school theorists give you grief. They want to see games and fun-fun-fun and guessing from pictures, but you don’t have to do much of that when they aren’t watching.

Once you find what you can for materials, get back to us for more hints on methodology.

Wow, Victoria, I think you really misread my post! I do not feel that Great Leaps 3-5 (have you used it?) is an adequate remedial phonics program. Since Karen’s child was supposedly receiveing OG phonics instruction, I told her she could skip the Great Leaps phonics exercises.

Janis

Hi, Karen! Sorry I was away from the computer for a couple of days! I am assuming you received a copy of the post I just wrote to Victoria where she apparently misread my earlier post about skipping the phonics part of Great Leaps.Otherwise I completely agree with the rest of what she said! Just ask the tutor about what she is doing. You’re paying her, so I think you have a right to know. :-)

Janis

Look at Reading Reflex book. You can use the book to teach phonics and use it for warm-ups. You can say that you are teaching spelling strategies, because you are. It is very simple to teach PA and phonics using this method. You can justify using it by telling the school that the educational initiative more than suggests that you use phonics. It is part of balanced literacy, which by the way is a different way of saying whole language.

nt

I was just trying to make a point that I feel is very important. If you tell one writer/teacher to skip the phonics, a lot of other people will decide it’s a waste of time and they can skip it too, with disastrous results. See any “whole language” classroom for active demonstration — in fact in its origin and theory, “whole language” was supposed to include phonics; but when it came to actual application, people just skipped the stuff they didn’t like to do. Yes, if the student is getting a *more* complete phonics program elsewhere, certainly there’s no need to duplicate; but if you skip it entirely you will have the usual problems.