two questions

shall I wait to give my brief answers to complex questions until I am invited to do so? Not sure the questions allow the kind of brevity you so graciously requested.

These are exactly the types of reading behaviors I see in my son although its diminishing over time. I suspect he memorized a bunch of words , and is now learning to really really decode (a good tutor, and PG at home). I can tell he’s decoding because he reads so slowwwwwly that I can hear him do it. He also occasionally adds sounds that aren’t there (says “sh” instead of “s”) and skips small words. So off to the behavioral optometrist we go.

please reply, but do try to be brief, my preference only, i think if we keep it brief, we might get to the root of the answers to these questions,

thanks, libby

My two cents—a parent with a kid with all these issues.

Rhyming—I think kids who can’t rhyme don’t hear the sounds correctly. As my son’s auditory processing has improved, so has his ability to rhyme. There was a point where he really understood rhyming but with certain words, he wouldn’t rhyme them correctly. He wasn’t hearing the last sounds correctly and was rhyming what he heard.

Because—in my experience, this is an issue that indicates that a child has certain words in their sight vocabulary but has not visually retained the pattern in their mind. My son was like this too–he could read tons of CVC words by sight but if you gave him one that he didn’t know—like Pam—he would say Pame (long A). We got major relief on this one buy using a more visual approach to PG ( a la Shay). Now he is generalizing his knowledge.

Beth

You’ve asked for brevity….remember.

Question One

how about some answers for why some kids cannot rhyme, and try to suggest something beside it is hard,

The inability to rhyme is sometimes an indication of lack of verbal practice. The importance of rhyming is another matter. Rhyming is important and has been important in our language’s rhythm, used for thousands of years by sages to help them remember their presentations….druids for instance had to tell long histories and geneologies. In these cases, this is an inheritied interest. From the emergent reader’s needs, rhyming can help in correct prediction.

Question Two

a child reads the word /because/ in context in a chapter book and two lines down she comes to the word paused, and is stuck,

the /au/ is just not transferring from the known words in her sight vocab,

why??

More than code is involved when we read. If the student had been fluently reading and hit the word “paused” the “au” may not have stood out. Remember, there are a lot of rules. a and u are both vowells - could this not be a long a (in her mind) and now you’ve got an “e” thrown into the action with that “d” what is all of this doing to that “a” - the new word with its intriguing combinations will cause many a new reader to stop.

This will not be brief. I’m sorry. These questions are too comples. If you don’t think it’s worth reading, it won’t hurt my feelings.

> below someone mentioned a kid who cannot rhyme,
>
> question one,
>
> how about some answers for why some kids cannot rhyme, and
> try to suggest something beside it is hard,

As Ken mentions, rhyming does help predict. I’ll go a little deeper: The ability to rhyme is part of a skill called phonological processing and a category of that called phonemic awareness. In order to read, children must transfer what they see back to the language center of the brain where it is connected to spoken language. Rhyming is an early phonemic awareness skill. “Phonemic awareness (P.A.)is the ability to think about the individual sounds in words. In order to read, students must understand that words are made up of speech sounds, or phonemes.” (National institute for literacy. 2001. “Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read.” Washington: United States Department of Education and National Institute of Child Health and Hman Development). Children who lack rhyming skills generally lack other higher-order P.A. skills such as the ability to segment individual sounds in words or blend them together to form a word.

> question two
>
> a child reads the word /because/ in context in a chapter book
> and two lines down she comes to the word paused, and is stuck,
>
> the /au/ is just not transferring from the known words in her
> sight vocab,
>
> why?? why does code not transfer, why is /found/ so easy,
> then /crouch/ is not

There can be several answers for this question—it can vary greatly by student.
1. Some students have not been explicitly taught that /ou/ often (not always) makes the sound vowel sound in “couch.” (Many teachers and programs do not ask the student what they are thinking for the sound of /au/ or /ou/ when they come to a word like “pause.” I left off the inflected ending “ed” because it can say /t/, /d/, or /ed/ and needs its own instruction in what to do when a word has this suffix.)

2. Some students have had the instruction but haven’t had enough practice to automaticity. Using trade books or basals exclusively may not give enough practice on applying decoding skills.

3. Some students who have had both instruction and much guided practice with decodable text may also fail to remember things…need more practice using a different memory channel. (This also includes students who have speech issues, including mtor problems…they may not get to the oral language center due to pronunciation.) Some students need to memorize using verbal games, some visual strategies, some need to move while they memorized. So, the problem could be in visually recognizing, applying back to the oral language.

4. Still others may have trouble with generally applying any skills until much, much direct instruction and guided practice time occurs. This may include the low cognitive group.

>
> or child reads /enough/ and then gets to /tough/ and says toog

The “ough” pattern is a tough one because it has four different sounds. I go with the most high frequency one /uff/ (really should be upside-down & backwards e—schwa)

Reasons are the same as in your first example.

Reading is an associative process. It begins with visually recognizing symbols and associating them with sounds and subsequently with words recognized in our hearing vocabulary.

Brief?? To the point?? ME??

OK, the short and snappy one-liners (I usually avoid these because they often sound like put-downs, but honest they aren’t).

(1) A kid who doesn’t know how to rhyme has not *learned* to rhyme.

Yes, rhyming is fun, and yes, many many oral cultures use it as a way to help memory and fluent recitation. Nonetheless, it isn’t natural or automatic. The child has to learn what a rhyme *is* and then how to use this. A combination of natural talent and teaching is involved. Kids who come from families with poor/unstimulating language environments often have no clue how to rhyme and have to be taught (I have seen/done this with over half of a class in Grade 1). Kids in child-centered families are surrounded by rhymes in nursery tales, Mother Goose, songs, hymns, Barney, and so on. The supposedly “natural” development of the skill comes from thousands of hours of exposure. No exposure, no skill. Kids with hearing/auditory deficits also don’t get the benefit of the exposure because they are either not hearing the sounds or not analyzing them; so IF you think you need to teach the rhyming skill, direct teaching is needed. I question whether it’s necessary or not; a lot of beginning programs use rhyming as a cop-out or trick to avoid teaching phonics directly; seems roundaboout to spend a lot of effort teaching a “quick trick”. I have taught reading successfully to a kid with multiple deficits who could not rhyme at all. But he could read. You can teach the rhyming skill in reverse as it were, by first teaching reading and then teaching that words that end the same are rhymes (I have done this.)

(2) A kid who is guessing is guessing.
He is not really reading. He isn’t analyzing because he has been taught not to analyze.

If he is not transferring from “sight” words to unknown words, that means he is doing EXACTLY what you taught him, and memorizing the words as wholes by sight.

If you want him to be able to analyze words by parts and generalize sound patterns to other words, then you have to stop telling him to look at the word as a whole and teach him to break up ALL words into sound patterns. Teaching reading twice over with two mutually contradictory sets of rules is going to be slow and difficult and frustrating for all concerned. It takes a little time but within a few weeks there is a great sigh of relief as the reading process finally makes some sense.

The au pattern can be generalized as usually aw, sometimes a (laugh), and sometimes just difficult.
The ough pattern is one of the two ugliest things in the English language, and can’t really be generalized. The gh stands for either f or nothing, and the ou stands for *one* of the six sounds of o, u, or ou. The only advice I give is to try various combinations until one makes good sense.

Hi victoria,

I’ll toss this in for you to think about….maybe you’ll like it maybe you won’t, but kids seem to get it when I do it.

I teach “gh” as a digraph only for /g/ as in ghost, ghoul, ghastly, etc. I do not teach it as a digraph for /f/…see below.

I teach “ough” as having four overlaps. /oe/ in though, /ow/ in bough, /oo/ in through and /aw/ in thought (the most common.) If I had more time I would probably do some comparing of though, through, thorough and thought, but don’t.

Then, and here’s the original part, I think: I teach “ugh” as a digraph representing the /f/ sound. This works in laugh /l/a/f/, in cough /k/o/f/, in rough /r/o/f/, in tough /t/o/f/ and enough /ee/n/o/f/ as well as all their derivatives of course. I’ve found that kids don’t resist thinking of a “short-o” sound in any of the words cough, tough, rough and enough, even though we tend toward /aw/ in cough and /u/ in the other three. Thus, with this one innovation I turn five troublesome words into phonetically-correct words. I also avoid having to represent the “au” in laugh as the /a/ sound, and the “ou” in “cough” as the /aw/ sound, which are both very irregular. Also, it simplifies their understanding of “gh” which is now only used for /g/.

For PGx users, I just map the /f/ sound and add those five words under “ugh” along with maybe “laughter” and “rougher.” Of course, it is then unnecessary to map “gh” as a /f/ sound.

Still, there’s no getting around the fact that these words are bears. What I’m doing is very consistent with the underlying philosophy of the programs I use, however.

Hi libby,

Sounds like you’ve got a couple of short answers stored up…I look forward to them.

I don’t know the answer to the rhyme issue, but I do have a short story.

I was trying to teach phoneme manipulation (say “kit” without the /k/) to an adult client one day and he just couldn’t do it. I then happened to spend about 10 minutes on rhyming words, asking him what was the same about “cat” and “hat” for instance. Turns out he didn’t have a clue. When asked which of “can,” “fan” “tan” and “fit” didn’t go together, he picked random words.

So, we went over some examples, until he figured out how it worked, pretty much. The interesting thing was that immediately upon finishing this little process he could then manipulate phonemes relatively well.

So, maybe rhyme ability is a precursor to the ability to manipulate phonemes? Only one example, but that’s what happened. It did make me question the research claiming rhyme ability is unimportant to the reading process though……Rod

Hi again libby,

I agree with victoria (and some others) here, and I’m curious what you think. Kids learn a lot of “sight words” and don’t look at the code within them. Most early readers can read “because” but very few can tell you what the digraph “au” represents. At least that has been my experience.

With the right initial teaching, they would just “know” that “au” is the /aw/ sound, but I doubt that happens much. Then, once they have some weird mnemonic rattling around in their head for most of the sight words they’re insecure about, it becomes a real challenge to even get them to think about decoding, much less do it.

(end of the short answer…*s*)

For example, I would love to know what was being processed in the mind of the kid who, upon being corrected (pencil simply pointed at the word) after saying “then” for “when,” looked at it for a couple of seconds and then said “That IS then!….pause …no, when.” He certainly wasn’t paying any attention to the sounds in the word, but he was clearly processing something and whatever it was, was failing him.

As an aside, some behavioral optometrists consider misreading of little words, saw/was, and/the/a, etc., to be a manifestation of a visual issue. While it may be, it’s also possible, given current teaching practices, that the kid is relying on a mnemonic device instead of looking at the code within the word. Try giving a short spelling test using words like which, who, whom, when, then, the, an, on, where, there, here, and they and see how some of these kids do….not well, in the case of the sight word reader, I suspect….Rod

Thanks for asking these two questions. They describe my son’s reading to a ‘T’! I am very interested in the responses, since the school doesn’t think he needs help and I am trying to do it on my own. The reponses have provided some really good information. (I’ve had three private tutors - but they tell me he just needs to learn to read “by sight” and that he will never learn to read phonetically - I let them go - and he is learning gradually to do it phonetically!)

I do have a question, though - what about the “ie” and “ei” words. There are rules, but my son had those last week - and three of the 15 words didn’t fit the rule (weird, receive, something else). Since you all are so creative - can you come up with a good way to teach that? I just listed the “ie” words in one column and the “ei” words in another - and said memorize the 5 words on the short list. You know those are always “ei.” Anything else on your test is “ie.” Really terrible - but my son can’t spell well enough to even get enough of the word into a Franklin speller to get the correct word back out!

Lil

Rod, I really like your system for organizing those pesky digraphs. I’m going to start using it. Thanks.

“Kids learn a lot of “sight words” and don’t look at the code within them”

not sure i agree here Rod, how come some kids can see some sight words once or twice, and voila, they can take this code and simply plop it into new words and read them, they do see the code within

while the kids we all tutor and work with, this rarely happens, we must use PG or whatever methods and explicitedly teach code,

i listened in one of my grad classes and a mother said her child learned to read magically???

why, why is it like magic for some and not others??

yeah, Rod, i do have a simple answer, i think the ability to segment drives the entire reading process, i think we make it too complicated, perfect segmenters learn code with almost no instruction

weak segmenter, poor rhyming, weak segmenter, code transfer does not happen,

i think good readers see and hear all the phonemes in every word they read with so little effort they do not even realize they are doing it

poor segmenters do not do this, hence code does not transfer, even if we fix segmenting,

it is not a default strategy

anyone agree, i think if segmenting were addressed with 3 and 4 yo, we might head off some reading problems, not all, but some,

so my answer is simple, it is one word – segmenting

any thoughts, is this tooooooo easy, or is it more???

libby

I stumbled on this site by looking up phonicsgraphix which some people were chatting about on ld online . I can’t seem to be able to find too much since read america is up for sale and its web closed any ideas where to get pg or how to find out more ? My dd is 9 and just starting 4th grade she has had anog tutor for 2 yrs and is making progress but still isn’t a fluid reader or speller . Do you think PG would help ? Can a lay person do it at home?

Did you check www.readamerica.net? I just went there with no problem.

Also you can buy the book Reading Reflex at Barnes and Noble or any other book store like it. You can definitely do it at home.

I have kids *begin* with the two vowels go walking rule…first one does the talking and just has to say its name. (ie=/ie/ as in pie ei=/ee/ as in receive). This will get them the word 50% of the time. Then I teach that if this doesn’t a word, we need to know the other sound and be flexible. The other sounds are ie=/ee/ like in piece or chief and ei=/ae/ as in vein.

I let them try the two vowels rule and if they don’t produce a word, then I say, “What else could ‘ei’ say?” If they don’t know, I say a key word (like vein) and ask what vowel sound they hear. They I have them apply it in the word.

I work on the sounds with sound cards so that they see the stimulus (letters on the card) and say the sound that the letters make. Then, work on applying the sounds in words.

Some kids do just read with no instruction. My son’s best friend was one of these kids and I have explained it to my son that some (few) kids brains are just wired for reading. Everyone else has to be taught.

Yes, current reading research (and some old timers, too) indicate that the ability to segment is absolutely essential to acquiring word reading skills. But, then it must be blended into a word that we find in our hearing vocabulary and make meaning of. Then, we must understand the context in which it is placed. But, then we are into comprehension.

Interestingly, I absolutely agree with every statement you make about good readers seeing and hearing every phoneme.

A percentage of the population would learn to read no matter what we did for or against them. They will, though, learn to read faster with phonemic awareness and phonics training. They are the ones that see and hear the patterns without much or any explicit teaching.

Where are you taking your masters and in what area?

We you looking for specificity and conciseness over brevity? :-)

I was the one who asked about rhyming, and I apologize if I hurt other posters’ feelings. I didn’t mean to be insensitive. I was just feeling very frustrated that day.

I read all the answers and I am very grateful. I also doubt the phonological awareness programs that list rhyming as the first lesson for the 5 year olds. It’s okay for the 6 and 7 because they have been exposed to rhyming before. Back to my question on 5 year olds, I think that the first lesson should be on isolation particularly beginning sounds. What I did with my lesson the enxt day was I taught rhyming words directly and it is working so far. I am also exposing them to a lot of rhymes. I think that they had difficulty before because they didn’t have yet the concept of “same” and “different” and “beginning” and “ending”.

I also agree that rhyming words help in reading by analogy, predicting, and by word families, but it doesn’t help in decoding.

The basic rule is:

i before e exept after c

The *more complete* rule is:

i before e except after c
and when it says ay as in neighbour and weigh

The *exceptions* to the above complete rule are:

The weird financier can seize neither leisure nor rest.

OK, so this involves two mnemonics. I avoid mnemonics when there is any logic at all, bit this is one of the limited number of cases where there is little or no logic so mnemonics make as much sense as anything else. Memorize the complete rule and the exceptions and you will be accounted a good speller.

Ah, thanks - but what do you do with children who really can’t hear the differences. My son scored in the bottom 1% for auditory processing …

Why not just say that there are several ways to spell the ‘ee’ sound - e, ee, ea, ie, ei, e-e, ey, y - and leave out all the rules? Rules will never explain our code when you have 44 sounds and 26 letters. The only way that makes sense to me when teaching to a child about words is to say that our language has sounds and we have different ways to spell the sounds. Some sounds have many spellings and some have fewer. I find kids have no trouble with this logic.

Q3. What is the skilled reader doing when he reads?

Q4. How can we use that information to drive instruction for the low skilled reader?

I believe as Libby has stated that the skilled reader is a highly efficient segmenter and can play with sound with ease. That includes blending and auditory processing(taking sounds in and out of words). The child with good phonological processing skills begins to learn code as soon as print is put in front of him. This child does not use rules to learn code. For example, the words - cake, straight, vein, train, table, great, play, they - all the ‘a-e’ sound. ( a-e, aigh, ei, ai, a, ea, ay, ey) The good segmenter begins matching sound to symbol from the start and picks up all this code through implicit instruction.

Why not use this to teach the low skilled reader? Why do we think learning rules is easier than learning the different ways to spell a sound? Why is learning that apple stands for the ‘a’ sound easier than just learning that ‘a’ stands for the ‘a’ sound?

Sounds like you have done Reading Reflex/Phono-Graphix. With my son’s auditory processing disorder, teaching him ONE sound at a time was the only way we came even close to phonetice reading. :-) This was after I spent 5 years with the more traditional methods of teaching reading that didn’t work for him.
Lil

lil,

as i see from your post, you had spent 5 yrs working on reading with your son,

so i guess he is around 10,

so to make him a skilled reader, not only do you have to give him a reliable strategy but you have 5 yrs to make up,

as i stated earlier, i do believe the key is EARLY intervention, as Kathy stated above, a good phonologically aware kid, starts to see code and learn code by age 5, so when this kid is 10, he is just about an adult reader, he has had 5 full years to amass code, and his writing will show this as well

i think many of you see PA (phonemic awareness) as a precursor to reading, or something to do in kidg,

when what i see, is a good reader uses his good PA to continually, throughout his reading life, amass a huge reading vocabulary etc

if a kid struggles to decode, he is never going to amass the same vocabulary,

i had a 7th grader read the /candor/ as candoor,

this from some teacher telling him /or/ represents the sound /or/ as in door,

when i said the /or/ represents /er/, he said, Oh, candor, i know that word, he knows it as a verbal vocabulary word but not as a written vocabulary word,

good PA kids use this gift throughout their reading lives, not just in 1st grade etc

and Lil, think of your son, now that he is getting help, as a beginner reader, you cannot squeeze 5 yrs into 5 months, give him the same time you would give him if he was in 1st grade,

libby

susan,

i see segmeting as 100% not 50%, so we disagree there, and mixing in comprehension with decoding is what confuses the poor decoder,

comprehension strategies are a different area from decoding, in order to do the analogies on standardizsed tests, decoding must be flawless, no context is going to drive a kid through an analogy

there are many times we must read individual words,

i see poor decoders do this on a test question

question, is

Give examples of sedimentary rock,

poor decoder sees the word examples and puts in explain, and of course misses the questions

so reading one word at a time is important,

decoding and comprehension are two separate areas, one is deciphering a code

the other is learning from text, two entirely different skills and to combine comprehension as a way to decode leaves the poor decoder even more confused,

and this is what i see in many schools, SOAR to Success is based on this philosophy

teaching comprehension is more sexy and fun for the teacher, but teaching decoding is way more important for kids,

I see this all the time now that I am doing PG with my son.

For example, we did /e/ yesterday which is sometimes spelled “ea” as in bread.

So we are working thru some of the words and we come to “read”. My son hesitates. In this exercise its read /r/e/d/. But if he were reading a story it could also be read /r/ee/d/.

Same overlap as for lead - could be /l/ee/d/ or /l/e/d/ which of course could also be spelled led. Depends on the meaning. This is not new news of course, but for him , a frustrated decoder who has better comprehension skills, it was a bit of a revelation that his strength in comprehension was important too!

No wonder he can’t spell.

yes, context must be used for overlap when the overlap choice produces two real words such as read(reed) or read(red).

Scratch sheet spelling and process spelling do wonders for helping a child understand how spelling works. Have you tried these lessons? I find process spelling the real tool that helps a child put all the reading pieces together.

From, “Why Our Children Can’t Read” by Diane McGuinness.

The research evidence shows clearly that rhyming activities do not imact on learning to read as scientists once thought. The rhyme component of a word contains more than one sound. It consists of the final vowel sound plus any consonants that follow it. Multisound units, such as the rhyme, are not the basis for our alphabet code, so teaching rhymes is a waste of time. Pointing them out in structured lessons, where rhyming patterns and “word families” are taught as a basic decoding strategy, is actually detrimental: “the letters ay-tee sound /at/ in ‘the cat sat on the mat.” Instead, the child should learn that the sound /a/ is spelled a anywhere in a word, and the sound/t/ is spelled t anywhere in a word.

This doesn’t mean that children shouldn’t learn nursery rhymes, poems, or songs, and use word play. It’s something young children enjoy very much. Remember the finding that pig latin correlates with reading skill? If you want to teach a word-play game that actually might be beneficial, this is a better choice because it involves picking off a single phoneme from th efront of a syllable, putting it at the end, and adding /ay/:oo-day etc etc.

My input:

I do remember coming upon this research on ERIC. They looked at programs that included rhyming games to teach reading. The consensus was that it didn’t help.

if a child can rhyme, he can segment, i use rhyming for assessment only,

trying to teach rhyming without first assessing segmenting is going to be downright impossible,

ryhming shows a child who can segment and segment perfectly,

but to teach rhyming as a PA activity in kdg again, is going about the reading process from the wrong end

someone below posted that she could not teach rhyming, YOU don’t teach rhyming, you teach segmenting,

rhyming will follow as a by product of segmenting,

libby

So Kathy,

I’m not sure what “process” spelling is - we have done some of the scratch sheet spelling. I know for years I have told my son to just write the letters down as he “hears” them - in order. He is simply not capable of doing that. Visual processing is a problem for him - so looking at the word to see if it “looks” right is pretty useless, too. My opinion on that is until he becomes comfortable with reading on his own, he won’t have the exposure to know if the words look right.

So just last week we decided to try writing the letters down as he “feels” the sound in his mouth - jury is still out on whether that will be successful or not - but he does well with individual sounds - if he hears them in isolation with nothing else going on. We probably need to review PG again - we let off at the beginning of the school year since we were spending so much time on his homework. Ah well, we’re having yet another IEP meeting soon. Maybe I can get him out of homework all together until I can teach him how to read! Of course, then he will be behind in his other classes. Sheesh

Lil

> i see segmeting as 100% not 50%, so we disagree there, and
> mixing in comprehension with decoding is what confuses the
> poor decoder,

Before I say what I will, please know that I have a reputation in my district for a “phonics first” approach. I don’t put poor decoders in comprehension groups. I have four-five times as many phonics groups as comprehension groups. I do, though, work on comprehension skills in my phonics groups. Initially, it is vocabulary. Later it may be prediction and inference. Totally depends on the individual needs in my groups.

However, I do not use PG. I use Orton-Gillingham for phonics and Lindamood-Bell for my sound-symbol connection (if kids need that) and for spelling. If O-G is done correctly, it should not confuse the learner.

Comprehension is important in word reading, in my opinion. (I’ll discuss sentence and passage comprehension another time.) As someone on a thread herein writes about the two ways to pronounce “read”, so do many struggling decoders correctly pronounce a word that is not in their hearing vocabulary (or anyone elses in the group) and think they need to keep working on the word. An early word could be “puffin.” (In the midwest, we don’t see these and most of my kids are low enough socio that they’ve never been to Maine or the northeastern coastal regions.) I keep a picture of a puffin near when we are working on early syllabication skills.

> comprehension strategies are a different area from decoding,
> in order to do the analogies on standardizsed tests, decoding
> must be flawless, no context is going to drive a kid through
> an analogy
>
> there are many times we must read individual words,
>
> i see poor decoders do this on a test question
>
> question, is
>
> Give examples of sedimentary rock,
>
> poor decoder sees the word examples and puts in explain, and
> of course misses the questions
>
> so reading one word at a time is important,
>
> decoding and comprehension are two separate areas, one is
> deciphering a code
>
> the other is learning from text, two entirely different
> skills and to combine comprehension as a way to decode leaves
> the poor decoder even more confused,
>
> and this is what i see in many schools, SOAR to Success is
> based on this philosophy

SOAR to Success has a place. Not as wide an audience as the publisher would have teachers think, however. (That is true with many things :-))

> teaching comprehension is more sexy and fun for the teacher,
> but teaching decoding is way more important for kids,

Libby, I feel that you overgeneralize. The sexy analogy is also mystifying. There is nothing sexy about illiteracy at any level. Teachers teach what they think is right—what they’ve been taught is right in their preservice coursework. Despite the feelings of many parents, I don’t see teachers as unconcerned.

In the end, I believe we will find that teaching reading is a process with a definitive sequence, much like math. Comprehension is the last of the steps, but is one of the steps notwithstanding.

Comprehending is the final goal of reading. Before we can do that, we must get the word into our language center in the brain to see if we know the word. That’s requires putting the sounds together into a word and seeing if we have an associative meaning for the word we think we see. Then, how does that word fit into the context of what we are reading.

It is all interconnected.

Kathy wrote:
>
> Why not just say that there are several ways to spell the
> ‘ee’ sound - e, ee, ea, ie, ei, e-e, ey, y - and leave out
> all the rules?

Who said rules? I don’t teach rules. I teach kids to see words in patterns. Those patterns have sounds.

Rules will never explain our code when you
> have 44 sounds and 26 letters. The only way that makes sense
> to me when teaching to a child about words is to say that our
> language has sounds and we have different ways to spell the
> sounds. Some sounds have many spellings and some have fewer.
> I find kids have no trouble with this logic.

This is a party line and I have read these exact words from others before you.

I am continually studying different methods, programs, and strategies for teaching reading. A good teacher will not move on to new things if kids haven’t learned what they’ve taught today or yesterday. The proof is in achievement. If someone is successful with what they use, I say to continue. I don’t try to sell them on what I use.

I doubt that I will ever be finished learning about reading education. Some believe (even in my district) that I think I know it all. I don’t even know half of it. I do, though, know when kids can apply what I’ve taught them about reading and writing. I also know a thing or two about how brain learns.

So far, I’ve had two kids who couldn’t learn auditory discrimination. Both had profound speech issues. Other than that, I use Earobics software, lots of using the listening channel for the brain (non-threatening, low stakes). I have a great speech path, though. She does a ton of work with ‘em, too.

It is like re-wiring the brain because those wires have a short.

I’ve heard of great results using Fast Forward for these kids, however, I cannot afford them. So, we use Earobics software to get kids hearing different general sounds.

Thanks,

We’ve done the Earobics for the lower elementary grades. I just purchased the home version for the upper level/adults so he can go through it again in a different format. He has very little patience with fantasy - and ducks and bunnies, etc. I’m hoping the version for “mature audiences” will hold his attention better.

Lil

When it comes to learning styles and learners, the number of possible variables is too high to consider. We just may not generalize. Everytime we try to generalize something, there will soon be an exception to our reasoning.

It is hard for parents to get a good feel for this. (It was for me, too. I wanted to relate everything to how *my* kid learns.) Parents’ scope is narrow in focus and unless they are a teacher, too, they just don’t see the possibilities. Case studies are tough unless we have many, many similar cases to compare.

There are a ton of kids out there (estimate 30-40%) who are able to learn to read using whole words. There is another 30-40% who fail to learn to read in ascending degrees when using whole word approaches.

PS - the SLP at his school refuses to acknowledge the APD as an issue - and has let him go from SLP services … so anything he gets, I provide.

This is one of those oh-oh questions. Yes, of course, comprehension is important! However, once you admit this one thing to a sight-memorization propagandizer, the next thing you know you are being held up as an example of a convert against phonics and decoding. Absolutely, comprehension is vital. But you can’t comprehend if you are not decoding most of the words on the page, and don’t let anyone try to play bad logic games with you.

I’m interested to hear how that works out for him.

I usually pull my severe speech kids in for 1:1 reading instruction. (I’m lucky to be in a system where they allow this!) Even then, I have had two boys that made little progress. They just couldn’t hear the sounds. Now, this is out of hundreds & hundreds of kids. I still don’t like to lose even one.

Were these my children, I would have had them with our S/L department at our local children’s hospital. My own son had S/L problems and that’s exactly what I did even before he went to school. (I paid for it.) It took him a long time to hear & produce sounds. Lindamood-Bell helped him get started reading. (I paid for it.)

There is a real dilemna in our schools with regard to speech/language professionals. We cannot find them to hire. ASHLA (American Speech Hearing & Language Association if I’ve got my acronym correctly), controls how many students may enter programs in order to keep the market from being flooded. Well, it is anything but crowded. Then, many S/L’s choose to work for hospitals and private clinics rather than put up with all the “stuff” in public schools.

Here are some things you can do at home: Listen to things. Go outside and just listen and talk about what you hear. Listen to book on tape as a family time and talk about what you “see” in your mind’s eye. Play listening games—games with low visual appeal but high verbal and listening. These are not interventions. They are things families can do to enhance (not correct)listening skills.

I believe I understand what is meant by “sexy”. It isn’t literal of course, just the point that some things are exciting and interesting and active, and some things are actual work. Teaching comprehension means you can have all sorts of fun discussions in your classroom. It means you can do things like drawing and painting and glueing and call it a story map. It means you can read a funny library book that you enjoy out loud and call that a reading lesson. It means you can be glamourous and exciting to your audience, even if that audience is a bunch of five-year-olds. Not that any of these things are bad to do; just that unfortunately they don’t teach a kid *how* to read.
Teaching decoding means following a planned series of lessons instead of doing what you feel today. It means dragging reluctant readers through something they find difficult. It means repeating over and over again things that you (should) know perfectly well — the fact that this is new and difficult and may even be exciting to your *students* being what matters.
Yeah, it’s a lot less sexy to insist that a workbook page be finished and a page read orally than to dramatize being a mysterious witch. Of course, if you do it right, then your *students* dramatize being the witch, and as an adult you can enjoy this far more.

We did the local hospital thing a year ago - and I paid for it. After 4 sessions, the SLP there said she couldn’t do anything else for my son (?!?). The next closest one is over an hour drive each way … tough to do during the school year.

Lil

Yes and no. This works to a degree but then there are overlaps — final y is “ee” in longer words such as happy, funny, steadily; but “ie” in short words such as sky, try, by.

ei is “ee” in ceiling and “ay” in neighbour.

And so on.

The system is complex and you have to chip away at it from all directions.

Then when you come to spelling, life is even more complex. In reading you have one to three common sound patterns for a certain vowel pattern, but in spelling you just listed six or more spellings for a single sound. Some system of sorting is necessary. I go for a minimum number of basic rules as well as learning patterns.

The longer I work in this, the more question that 30% who are supposed to be able to learn using whole words. Yes, they get by. But they drag so much baggage behind them — slow and tiring reading, weak spelling, lack of confidence, poor pronunciation, test failures/low scores caused by anxiety and inaccuracy, poor grammar (never learned to look for those fine details), huge trouble in foreign languages (same), immense trouble in math (one inaccuracy and you lose it) and on and on. I run into kids on all levels of the spectrum, from severely LD students to my daughter’s gifted friends, and the loss of productivity due to not-good-enough reading skills is astounding. Just enough to get by is NOT a goal for the average to good to gifted student, and that is what they are achieving.

A cautionary note: using the skilled person as a model for the beginning learner has some grave dangers. There are many steps between the beginner and the skilled person. The person with the skill has worked through those steps in one way or another. Just because you don’t see the work doesn’t mean it wasn’t done — most excellent readers get that way by taking books to bed with a flashlight, and so on. If you try to jump the beginner over the intermediate steps and go immediately into the skilled level, you may crash into a brick wall.

An example from another field: Advanced skiers do what is called a parallel turn, with feet together, all in one swoosh. Beginning skiers traditionally learn what is called a snowplow turn, with the skis at an awkward V angle, moving slowly and with a lot of effort. Well, in the 1970’s a new theory developed — to teach parallel from the start. Beginners were given extremely short skis to make the process easier. And, to a degree, it worked. The beginners could turn the short skis easily and didn’t fall back to the snowplow. Everybody had a great time and people were proud of how fast they learned to ski. But problems arose. Especially when they got confident and went up to the top of difficult and dangerous slopes and they didn’t have the strength, the balance training, or the fallback skills to handle something truly nasty. They knew one quick trick and when it failed they were up the creek without a paddle (to mix metaphors and analogies). After a number of accidents and injuries and a few deaths, as well as a lot of students who progressed to a certain level and then stalled, the ski instructors re-thought the program. The shorter beginning skis are still used, although not the extremes of shortness, and basic skills are being taught again.

The parallels to reading instruction should be clear.

Word-memorization programs of the 40’s and 50’s (including the implementation of the Dick and Jane readers — not the writing of the books, but how they were supposed to be taught by pure memorization and speed drills) were based on exactly this kind of logic: experienced readers read words as wholes without sounding them out, so let’s *stop* kids sounding out and make them read words as wholes by presenting fl;ash cards too fast for decoding. Well, anyone who has read the research sionce that time knows how well this didn’t work. *First* you learn the beginning skills, *then* you work through the intermediate stages, and finally you get to the expert level. Unfortunately, no royal roads and no magic wands.

Thanks. This goes with my experience too.

Not just LD’s or impaired readers. There is a percentage at the top that is enhanced by phonics and PA but doesn’t require it to learn to read. They are linguistically talented.

Most whole language gurus think that 60-70% of the population is a-okay without phonics. I think it is more like 25-30%. However, that 30% will spell better with phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, I believe also.

In my district, our gifted kids are making such huge gains in reading using P.A. and phonics that the gap enlarges right away. Which brings us full circle from the 50’s on reading groups….

Hmmmm -

I had a tutor do patterns with my son for 1 1/4 hours twice a week, all summer, between 2nd and 3rd grade. At the end of the summer, he missed 19 out of 20 words on the spelling test she gave him. Apparently, they were all CVCe words - and he still didn’t get it.

Is my kid so different that no one can teach him? I have had some success using the Phono-Graphix for reading, but he needs more time with it … and it has done NOTHING for his spelling.

Lil

Once the child sees (perceives) the visual patterns, they must be associated to sounds and blended into a word. Kids w/auditory problems (and it sounds like your child’s is severe) can fail to make this two-step leap. (I also don’t really know what the teacher was doing but let’s assume that he/she wasn’t just all visual but taught some sound correspondence, too.)

I skipped over to another board where a mom is asking about how much gains per year were acceptable. I think this question could be mulling around you, too. My reading mentor would say, “As fast as we can but as slow as we must.” I’ve done a happy dance of celebration for six months gain in some kids and sighed at this gain in others. My two kids w/severe speech issues made little recordable gains. However, I do hear that one is making gains now. (Why? All the factors in the analysis are not known.)

I believe that our neurological systems grow and mature at very different rates. I have seen kids with stunningly good instruction and low previous reading gains come to me and make up 3-4 years in one year because they just were developmentally ready this year—it just clicked. Do I think for a minute that I’m a better reading teacher than my colleague? Nope. Most of the clinical reading teachers in my district are Lindamood-Bell trained with experience. They *know* how to attach sound-symbol. I’ve seen kids lose all their sound-symbol connection over one summer because the family would not make their kid come to summer school or the kid lost it in the one month summer school was out. I have been amazed at that very instance. (Do I think every reading teacher in my district is as good as I? Nope. But every teacher doesn’t have to be obsessed with reading and teaching it in order to make gains w/90% of the kids they serve. I just happen to want to figure out the bottom 1%.)

There are a lot of factors that go into child development. Some are emotional. Some are neurological. Some are environmental. Some are sociological. There are probably more “als” that I haven’t thought about this morning. Just these can provide thousands and thousands of different possible learning need combinations.

As a parent, you must continue to let your child know by actions over words that you believe that he/she will learn when they the time is right. That it is okay for timing to be different with different people. Let them know that you won’t stop until the right combination is put together even though that may take 10-15 years. (It did in my son’s case. He recently read two adult novels for his own pleasure. Brings tears to my eyes yet.) Keep encouraging them to believe that they can do it. With young children, it is vital to have fun with literature as a family. Enjoy stories together.

You will prevail.