stumped? reading problems

Hi Tina,

Many on here swear by phonographix. I taught my son with it after he failed to learn even the most basic phonemic awareness doing small group instruction, one teacher 2 students, at school every day for a whole year. The book is reading reflex about $12 on Amazon. There is another book with even more information designed for teachers. Janis mentions it in one of her posts, she is a great resource.
Shay is the other expert on this method, I believe she teaches high school kids with great success.

Linda F

I would like to examine the childrens testing more carefully to see if vision and hearing were totally segregated. I ran into this problem with my son.. The tester gave him an auditory comprehension test that included questioning the child about pictures, except oops the child couldn’t see well up close so he got them wrong. It was assumed he had a verbal comprehension problem. How would you like to be told your child had a verbal IQ of 58 when he is probably verbally gifted? It can work both ways. It’s amazing how an undiagnosed problem in one of the senses can masquarade as a problem in the other. I also ran into another little problem. When my son took the non-verbal tests, believe it or not, in general, he did extreemly well (consisting mostly of big blocks and puzzles the kid could do at arms length). This mislead the tester into thinking he could not possibly have a vision problem (I asked). The tester said he did poorly in one subcatagory- mazes. This did not make any sense to the tester because children normally will do well or poorly across the board in one area. When the final test results came back to the school the scores had been adjusted so that it looked like he did much better in mazes than he really did, and the other nonverbal subtests had been lowered. In other words, I suspect the tester fudged the figures to make them “look right” when in fact they pointed to an eye problem she didn’t catch wise to, that might have been picked up sooner if she hadn’t played games with the figures. We’re all guilty of putting out own “slant” on things to a certain extent, although not everyone would alter scores. . It’s human nature to try to make sense of things. I had a seemingly undiagnosable illness a few years back (a rare drug reaction). I had the most bizare symptoms. I got hold of hospital records later on and discovered many of the doctors had altered what I had said to fit a particular diagnosis…Each of them were wrong of course, and it threw off any other doctors who looked at the records. I’m very lucky to still be in posession of my poor gall bladder which apparently gets falsely accused of everything and anything… Anyway, I would start out by making sure you are doing purely auditory and purely visual , purely tactile tasks…different distances..noisy vs quiet environment. Don’t assume any of the previous testing is accurate. Somebody has missed something. Also don’t overlook boredom and lack of cooperation while smiling and appearing to listen as a factor in throwing off test results. This can really factor in if you are dealing with very bright, frustrated children. When I’m about ready to throw in the towel I have learned it is time to give my child something much much much more difficult and usually- not always- things will dramatically improve. It sounds counter intuitive and no one wants to frustrate or intimidate a struggling child, but sometimes it’s just what the doctor ordered. I happen to like Phonographx- (Reading reflex) by the way, which was mentioned by another poster. There are some really good diagnostic tests in there. I found them extreemly helpful with my own son. Don’t be thrown off because the book is intended for parents. It’s great. Of course if the child can’t see the letters……I can tell you from personal experience,you should never assume because a child gets a clean bill of health from the family eye doctor or hears well on a particular day that he can consistently hear and see. And then there are some really peculiar neurological problems out there…ever read “The man who mistook his wife for a hat”? But I wouldn’t expect more than one kid in a school to have something in that category.

When I hear people say they have “tried everything”, I have learned to be very skeptical. Often it really means we have tried everything that fits into the prejudices of our local special ed director/principal/state reading specialist/whoever.

I am constantly reminded of a school district where I taught and tutored a number of students; this district had a whole testing and evaluation protocol set up for special ed, and they determined the “best” method of teaching reading for each student individually. Oddly enough, the “best” method for every single student tested turned out to be exactly the same, the standard memorization-of-sight-words followed by ineffective implicit phonics that was used in the classroom, only more of the same. Oddly enough, the reading instruction in this district was not very successful, and oddly enough their special ed did nothing to improve students’ abilities. But the school psychologist and director of education were living very comfortably as they went through the same pointless exercise over and over, and the special ed teachers worked very hard doing what they had been taught and had been told to do despite continued failure; in their world view, this was just how the world works, that you try and try to teach but don’t expect students to learn very much.

If you really want to succeed with these students, you have to take scriabin’s advice and look with a very, very jaundiced eye on all past information. Start fresh and look at what the kids *really* can and can’t do and really know and don’t know. This will often bear little relation to what you see written. I do NOT speak of formal testing — you’ve had far too much of that already, and testing doesn’t teach; I’m suggesting teaching interviews, and individual reading and math observations and criterion-referenced *oral* reading evaluation.

An example — while tutoring in the area mentioned above, I had a student with Kleinfelter’s Syndrome. At first I had no documentation and anyway I wanted to get to know the student as he was. The special ed director assured me, face to face, that he had mastered addition and was learning multiplication and working on the three times tables. Well, after several sessions of working back and back as he failed through subtraction, back-counting, addition of two digits, addition of one digit, and counting, I discovered that he could not count accurately past six. Huh? How can you add eight plus four if you don’t even know what an eight is?? How can you multiply three times three (or for that matter, two times four, which he supposedly “knew”) if you can’t get back six?? I also discovered that in order to “add”, he had to have two free hands and a ruler; he knew less about the concept of addition than a trained parrot. Then to work on the counting I started talking about order; found out he couldn’t verbalize “before” and “after”. He could DO things all right — found his way all around town, mother reported that he repaired bikes, etc.; just no way to abstractly conceptualize it. He couldn’t tell you if breakfast was before or after supper, or if shoes went on before or after socks (dressed himself fine, just no abstraction.) Now, the formal testing totally missed all this; he could put pictures in order just fine so he passed the ordering test; he was well-trained with his ruler trick and so passed the addition test. Later I read the documents which the mother gave me and it turns out that order problems are a well-known pattern in Kleinfelter’s — just that seven years of full-time schooling and special ed and a “qualified” educational psychologist never once spotted it. He was placed in an Emotionally Disturbed classroom. He was not violent, just very confused!
I would bet that your students have some “hidden” (to people who won’t bother to look) deficits of this general type.

Back to what to do, for stage zero, check on hearing and vision with real professionals, more than the nurse’s screening (just as if you have a fever that won’t go down for two weeks you ask for more than a nurse’s screening and two aspirin; serious and long-standing symptoms require serious investigation). See Rod’s old posts here about vision therapy and his success working with a talented provider; vision therapy is still controversial and there are a lot of questionable practitioners, but Rod and his therapist have apparently found something that works. See other old posts here about CAPD (Central Auditory Processing Disorder). These issues need to be remediated as much as possible before you can teach reading effectively — as scriabin points out, if you can’t see (or hear) something properly, you are not going to do well at it.

Then, find out what really works in teaching reading. I do not know what your special ed department believes, but unfortunately the large majority of teachers in North America have been trained to believe religiously to start reading instruction with memorization of whole words, so this is most likely what has been tried. The phonics instruction is most often after-the-fact based on the memorized words, so kids who have difficulty with visual memorization to start with get cut out twice. Then they are tested and said to fail at phonics, when the problem is that the phonics was never taught directly. Go to the “LD In Depth” baord on this website, and read the NIH/NICHD report on Teaching Chiuldren to Read; it covers phonemic awareness and many of these other topics, and gives very specific directives about what works, notably (1) systematic *synthetic* (part-to-whole) phonics in every classroom (2) guided *oral* reading and (3) teaching comprehension directly, in a variety of ways.

You have been recommended to use Readiong Reflex from the Phonographix and/or Readamerica company. I have not used this program (talk to Shay for more info from an experienced user) but I understand that it is a good fundamental sound-to-symbol system. However, not everybody succeeds with it, although a large number do. For the minority who don’t, go to the International Dyslexai Association bulletin board, ignore the bulletin boards which often have a lot of misinformation unfortunately, but go to the eps site and look into Orton-Gillingham materials which are more detailed. For OG you definitely need the teacher’s manual, expensive but vital.. Or, get Lindamood-Bell materials, also somewhat more expensive but very well-designed and effective, and **follow the teacher’s manual for whatever program you choose in detail.** Those of us who have been there and done that have seen that a huge number of “failed programs” were never implemented to begin with — if you only do the fun stuff and leave out all the hard work, well, you’ll reap what you sow.
There are other ways to design your own program, which I do, but from the sound of things you’ve had a bad time trying to do this so you would probably be relieved to get something detailed and clear to start off with.
I keep reminding people that it isn’t the materials that teach, it’s the teacher, so buying one of these programs isn’t a cop-out, just the opposite; you will work very hard learning how the system works and very hard working with the kids, but it’s worth it.

Wonderful post, Victoria! Thanks for taking the time to write it.

Blessings, momo

You probably already have some good suggestions to go on. My first recommendation is to hit the decoding, hard. There are some good techniques you can use. I am not LiPs trained, but for really severe problems (most not that severe) this program teaches the learner to use articulatory feedback (kinesthetic).

In the resource room I like to make use of letter tiles, home made ones, extensively, for the first two years, or so, of my program. Building and checking words that have been provided orally to the student with letter tiles is a really good activity to teach them to: segment sounds, sequence sounds, blend sounds. We try to emphasize patterns and similarities in words at the same time. Ultimately we do want our students to process words in chunks, not letter by letter, but we have to teach the letter by letter carefully first, then link to the chunks.

I get into syllables, about year 2 (depending on speed of mastery, etc). I then teach students to deal with two syllable words, then three and four. They need much guided practice and application with coaching. I believe this is the key to successful programs and where we usually fall down. The resources are not there to do the intensive coaching every day, oftentimes, and people hunger to speed remediation along faster than it maybe should go at times.

My experience is that some people need an incredible amount of good teaching. One article I read mentions that dyslexic type readers needed 100 times the number of exposure to master something in a controlled study. We just don’t get this in schools that we CAN teach people, but the time and opportunity must be there.

I have found that when I use good methods, I generally see progress. It can vary how much and how fast. Sometimes I have to hang in there and chip away for over a year. This is hard and the IEP process seems to demand that we make changes if we don’t get quarterly progress, or whatever. Not all children learn like that. Some crawl along for a year, they are so deficient in processing skills, that is mostly what is being put in place the first year, then they may take off.

I had a fellow whose first annual review was about January and things looked dismal, it was a hard meeting for me and I lost sleep the couple of nights before. He had made small progress. Well, by March this little guy was cookin’. By June he was picking up books on crocodiles and the science things he likes and reading them himself. He is a far cry from grade level, he has several processing issues. But, the teaching that had been going on finally came together for him.

How fast they progress depends upon multiple factors, some are: the extent number of processing deficits the child has, overall intelligence issues, motivation and drive, your teaching, the amount of time you can spend teaching/coaching the child, the amount of time the parents spend reading with the child at home…….I am sure I missed some.

be trained in both multi-sensory phonics (such as Orton-Gillingham or OG as we call it) and Lindamood-Bell Phoneme Sequencing (LiPS or LmB LiPS).

Almost any phonics program you use will be helped by OG training. Many children require moderate to intensive phonemic awareness instruction before they are ready for phonics. They also require a teacher who can hear and demonstrate how to isolate, delete, add, shift, and blend phonemes swiftly and confidently.

Pre-serve teacher preparation does, IMHO, a decent job of preparing one to teach reading comprehension. There are some dandy resources (including thse for speech/language) out there for teaching those skills and strategies. I include critical thinking in this category (which some children may be slower to acquire than others.) I do believe that schools have an overall better handle on whole-word instruction than phoneme-based instruction. I agree with Victoria’s message wholly—and have seen it personally. I took all this training on my own before my teacher ed classes. (They had no idea *what* to do with me.)

The fluency piece can be tricky, too, because it can be caused by a number of different things. So often, though, a repeated readings program can be of great assistance. I use Great Leaps in Reading Fluency along with some teacher-made materials.

For a good, basic decoding/fluency/comprehension program for at-risk learners, check out SPIRE at http://www.spire.org/ They’ll take you from phonemic awareness (pre-reading) through about grade 5 or so. I like the phonemic awareness piece in the Kindergarten books. They sell training; however, if you take O-G and LiPS trainings, you will be able to teach using their materials (and many others) in a diagnostic manner rather than following the same program despite the child’s need. For older students, I use a mix of materials but heavy on the Wilson Language O-G based program.

Taking two-day workshops is like having someone give you fish instead of teaching you to fish…again, JMHO.

but read and enjoyed Victoria’s and it inspired me to write. Sorry, Victoria. I wasn’t trying to over-shadow your response. I believe what you say 100% and have seen it.

I must be having some sort of visual discrim problem myself…

We have tried the lips program with very limited success with these boys. The speech path. and I work closly together making sure we have consistency especially with me being onsite and her only availabe twice a week.

Thanks for the encouragement.

To all who have posted, I want to thank you. I have read each and every post, taken notes and am off to read more. Please dont forget this rural Nebraska teacher who starts class in 10 days. The books, letter tiles, word wall, WYNN program etc are all set. The classroom teacher is focuisng on grade level lierature and comprehension and the speech path and I are focused on the reading skills. Hopefully the kids read over the summer (read to even) and we are off and running. May God provide the key to understanding this year like he has for others.
TO ALL:
Regular ed teachers know their curriculum. Special ed. teachers know their students! (parent should know the most tho!!)

Victoria, I want to thank you initially for your response, even thought I think you were off base at the start I stuck with your response and found some information I was able to use towards the end.
In the future, please don’t overgeneralize on posts. What you did not know is first I never said I had tried everything. If I had, I wouldn’t be here looking for help.

Second, I AM the special ed department except for the people we contract in. I have the freedom to choose the methods and materials I use and I use quite a variety. While sticking with a basic phonics approach (despite the tendancy for some to tell me I am fighting an uphill battle), I have tried to incorporate other approaches in. I have used them as supplemental and reinforcemnt of concepts introduced and taught. Personally, I have consulted with reading specialists, assistive techonology people, optomitrists (that help me with basic vision therapy in my classroom at no cost to the district), to name of few besides the other numerous professional spoken to at conferences, workshops, service unit meetings, etc. And yes, I have had other professionals in the area of reading come in and observe to give me feedback. Part of the materials I use are even directed instruction (SRA- Horizons)

Third, I know these boys. They are identical twins that when they started several years ago, I couldn’t tell them apart. Visually I still can’t. But when I work with them, within 30 seconds, I know which boy is sitting there by the little things they do…How close he holds book to the methods he is using to decode. I can tell you without my clipboard/notes which letters and sounds which boy is confusing etc. I may not know as much about this outside my room but I try to know as much as I can.

I will keep in touch with you and let you how your suggestions go. In this area of the country, we have just haven’t seen this type of reading/learning problem.