Making progress with PG, and a few questions...

Karen:

Please be patient, your child’s scores are excellent, you have done a great job. 86% on code is outstanding. Your child will now need to read and read. Grade level fluency cannot be reached overnight.

I also think the spelling part of the PG instruction is critical and should not be skipped. Make sure you spend enough time with this part of the program. It is through scratch sheet spelling and process spelling that the child internalizes the logic of the sound symbol connection. I find that process spelling really helps the child to begin to focus on each letter in the word. I am working with an 8th grader right now who has just blossomed with the process spelling. He was reading with errors from years of incorrect reading but the spelling part of the instruction has been key for him.

If possible have your child use it when he is doing his writing assignments from school and always use SSS or process spelling, depending on the words in his spelling list, to study for spelling.

Once he sees that his new strategies will drive all his work with words the errors will lessen and it will become easier and easier.

Kathy,

I am familiar with the scratch sheet spelling concept but it seems you are talking about a specific program. I have not seen a PG spelling program. Is there such a thing, workbooks maybe.

My son’s reading is just wonderfull thanks to PG. He is in need of spelling help.

Karen,

Congrats, I have often thought that of all the things I have done in my life teaching my child to read was truely my greatest achievement. It is nice to have someone who understands that; as I am sure you do.

And, yes, my husband thinks I am a genius too!

To know that patience is not one of my virtues!

I read ahead in Reading Reflex to familiarize myself with process spelling since its been referred to on this board. But my son is a great phonetic speller. He just invariably chooses the wrong spelling of each sound . I assume this will get better over time, and from lots and lots of reading, but it still seems basically like memorization. You just have to *know* which spelling is the correct one. (what’s cute is how he is incorporating his new code knowledge into his spelling. Many of his vowel sounds are now vowel pairs ) Or am I missing something?

I think one of the hardest things to do after using any reading program is to give the child time to internalize all of his new reading strategies.

Choosing the vowel digraphs for all vowel sounds is cute and I am not surprised he does that. He has now learned all about ea, ai, oa, ow, etc. Learning the right sound pic choice will only come from seeing that word over and over again in print. MS words will actually be easier for him to spell, there is less advanced code in them, less sound picture choices.

Haven’t you had to write a word 2 or 3 times trying different spelling choices to ‘see’ which one looks right. We all do it, even adults. If you already haven’t done so tell your child that everyone needs to write words several times to see which spelling is correct. We can’t spell every word in the dictionary, I know I can’t.

If he is writing phonetically and getting a sound pic for every sound then you have done a good job of teaching the skill of segmenting. The right sound pic choice for the vowels will come in time.

I do tell kids that with SSS the only parts of the word they really have to work on are the sound pics that have more than one spelling. At least it makes the memorizing task more manageable for them.

If you are not already doing this take his spelling words and have him segment them into the sounds and then write each sound on a small square piece of white paper. Clip each word with paper clip. Your child can then build the words to practice studying.

One third grade teacher in my school had her kids do this with all 15 spelling words and then for fun the kids put all the little squares in one big pile on their desks and played a large word scrabble game. They would race to see who could build all the spelling words.

With SSS sometimes I turn that into the Millionaire game. After the kids in the class have written all the choices, I tell them to circle their ‘final answer”, the one they think is correct. We make it into a big deal and then if they get the correct one they give themselves $100. We see who has the most money at the end.

You can buy a reading book called Super Spelling from Read America but it is not necessary. I think SSS and process spelling are enough. They are the spelling strategies we all use to spell. Since you say your child’s reading is good, he is now ready to use his new skills to spell.

Read my post to Karen for some spelling ideas.

Karen,
Take it easy with the programs! Let him practice and I am going to send you something but I need you to email me directly with your address. Don’t mix up program and what I told Lil holds true, practice, practice, practice and Rome wasn’t built in a day! Patience is also the order of the day!

Linda,
The spelling program is called Super Speller. Please email me your address. I may have it but I don’t know where. The Speller program will give the spelling strategies that he needs.

You need the Super Speller Kathy, email me.

I’m not planning on having him do everything that is suggested to me… just trying to sort out what makes sense in the big picture. After all, if I had listened to his school we would have just hired a tutor and never learned about Phonographix or Interactive Metronome or anything else! I’ll be happy to report back again after we finish the rest of the PG book and he’s learned the rest of the code. Its very exciting.

Karen, this is really great!!! Even after all the therapy my son has had, he still could not score 100% on the AP portion!!! (at least 6 months ago—haven’t checked lately) And to answer your question, FFW is for kids with auditory processing problems. It does nothing (at least for my son) for RAN deficits. Doesn’t seem to fit your kid, for what I know of him.

LIPS is also designed for kids with AP problems so might not be a good fit either. It uses feeling sounds in the mouth to make reading more multi-sensory. On the other hand, Seeing Stars might give him another way to hold onto the code. Are you talking about a clinic—I think they are pretty good at assessment usually. You also could get the book and use it in conjuntion with PG. You seem to be on a roll!!!

Beth

I think we are the right track with his reading, but we have so far to go… and of course for us the big issue is what school to send him to next year. Not really happy with our options at this point…

Anyway, the AP was the ONLY piece he got 100% when we started. I think he has strong auditory skills . My thoughts were exactly like yours about LMB - that the center would be qualified to see which program fits - and I suspect it would be seeing stars for the most part. Could help him cement the symbol/sound correlation. Again, we are looking for automaticity so my laymen’s theory is the more neural pathways the better.
And the sense of urgency is that we have to make school decisions based on how much progress he makes this year.

Before you spend many many dollars at a LMB clinic have your son’s reading assessed privately first(look at rate, accuracy, fluency and comprehension). I think that then you’ll have an objective basis for comparison; I am very suspicious of such an expensive program that has little research published about it, outside it’s own website. Of interest was this nice review of a study of a LMB type program, embeded phonics and a control group that saw gains in reading accuracy with both interventions but did not help close the gap in reading fluency. http://www.coloradoreading.com/torgesen.htm

My opinion is to leave the programs alone and keep on with PG. Your son needs to read, read and read some more in books that he can read comfortably. Once kids can read they need lots and lots of practice. Read books together, discuss them, read the same book at different times and then get together to discuss. The more he practices the better he will read. Find books at his level that are interesting for him and read, read, read.

PG will help tremendously, but your son will still need much more practice reading and progress may be a little slower due to problems with “automaticity.”

Children with severe RAN deficits appear to need much more practice internalizing and automatically recognizing orthographic patterns.

Even after 8 months of “intensive” reading remediation my son explained to me that he can only automatically recognize very simple words like “no, a, as, the.” Although his reading is becoming relatively fluent, it is very hard work for my him and he has to think about almost every single word. Right now I have him reading a book by Dick King-Smith “A Mouse Called Wolf.” This is a BIG step up for him! (He had been reading Henry and Mudge books). We take turns on the pages and when it’s my turn and I’m reading I put my finger under each word and enunciate each “chunk” so he can (hopefully!) visually “take in” the orthographic patterns.

Other things we do to help with this is I’ll hold the dry erase to the side and when he comes to a difficult word we’ll stop for a moment and go over it on the dry erase (similar to the PG exercises!).

I have to say, although it seems like it’s taking forever (we started “intensive” remediation last April), sometimes I’m so amazed by words he can read. Like tonight he breezed through some of the relatively difficult multisyllable words like “chocolate,” “finished,” and “especially.”

You may feel like your son isn’t progressing, but I think there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I’m still aiming at my son being a “top” reader by 6th grade! ;-)

(And, yet, if I could just get my son to automatically recognize “that/what” “would” and “were” that would be an accomplishment!)

Laura,

That is good news! It is wonderful to hear that both you and Karen are having success.
I think your son will get there. I think my son probably progressed at about the same rate as yours. We started a little sooner. He still says tired for tried sometimes, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter. He never really got the sight word thing either.

I can see how hard my son has to work at reading when he isn’t feeling well. On Monday he could paint the fence with my husband just fine but read painfully SLOWLY. It just takes a lot for him to hold reading together, even after all this time.

That’s great that your son is doing so well.

Beth

Beth,
Reading is very slow for my son too since he has to think about every word and therefore he doesn’t really enjoy reading (although he does say he likes when I read to him — so that gives me hope!).

Interestingly, and I don’t know if anyone else has noticed a similar reading pattern with their child, but my son will often read with the slow pace regardless of whether the book is a very simple one (for example “Little Bear” or a level 2 reading book), or a more difficult one like the one we’re doing now. In other words, both simple and difficult words seem to take similar effort because recognition of orthographic patterns takes time regardless. It’s almost comparable to a deciphering of patterns as oppossed to a grasping of words. But I do think it’s coming a long.

And yet there are days he’ll read and it seems like he’s still very behind. And then I’m feeling frantic because he can’t seem to grasp the simplest words and seems to forget the orthographic patterns.

What I’ve found with my own child is that he seems to do best if I approach reading from multiple angles.

Unfortunately, the one thing I’ve noticed lately is that by focusing so much on reading, it really detracts from spending time in other areas (like getting math facts down quickly and working on mathematical word problems).

Gosh, it never ends!!!!

I know the feeling—about it never ends. We’re back to multiplication facts.

I think with time your son will become more automatic on the easier stuff. One thing I did that helped was kept him reading easier material on the same level for a long time. It helped him to become automatic with many words—fluent at a second grade level. Now the mistake I made was not to keep him reading stuff above his reading level. He lost some knowledge of the code because of that.

So you might try a multi level approach.

Beth

Beth and Laura,
did you think about fluency drills?

I did this with my son last year, following the article by Phyllis Fisher that Sue posted on her “resource Room” page-
http://www.resourceroom.net/Sharestrats/IDAdrillarticle.asp

I had just used the Dolch list to select the words (or taken them from whatever book my son was reading- form his “decoding books”) and putting not more than 7-8 (?) words on one drill. He would work on a few lists at the same time until he would read them with 80 wpm (for some of them he was reaching 100 wmp). I would plot his scores and for every read above whatever number of words he will get a star et.c. I would use relatively big fonts, so this will not challenge him visually too much (it used to make a big difference for him whether the font is small or not). I will have a list of words at the bottom of teh page and will ask him to read them first before we started timing (1 minute), so he will know which words he might see.

I think I still have the templates on my old computer if you interested (for lists and for scoring)- they are Excel files that once you copy/paste a list of 7 words will randomly put them on a page, 7 in one line.

He absolutely loved it (he is very competitive), but this way he will gain a lot of practice with short words.

There is some info at:
http://www.gow.org/pages/About/resources7.html which I did not read, but looks interesting.

He did Great Leaps at school which seemed to help some. The problem with drills that are as fast as you can go with him is that he starts doing weird things with his eyes—he moves his head instead of his eyes. We have worked hard to eliminate this but he had a tutor this fall that gave him drills and I had to finally stop them. I guess it is because there is a visual processing component to his problems.

With PACE we did a version of this except that the word were nonsense words. We used a metronome so it wasn’t as fast you are talking about—more like one word per second which is what I think you need for automaticity. So a variation of what you are doing would be to use a metronome set at 60 beats per minute.
I think this might be benificial to my son. I think the idea of using Dolsch lists is a good one.

Beth

Beth from FL wrote:
>

> With PACE we did a version of this except that the word were
> nonsense words. We used a metronome so it wasn’t as fast you
> are talking about—more like one word per second which is
> what I think you need for automaticity. So a variation of
> what you are doing would be to use a metronome set at 60
> beats per minute.

60 nonsense words/minute is fast.

In my son school the desirable rates are 50 wmp for nonsense, 70 wpm for words in isolation and 150 wmp for passages.

The nonsense words (the way I understand this) are mostly for sound-symbol correspondence in the basic code. Once you go to advance code- the sound-symbol correspondence does not really hold since there are multiple choices and the only way to drill is using real words.

> I think this might be benificial to my son. I think the idea
> of using Dolsch lists is a good one.
>
> Beth

Ewa,
That’s a good idea! I just read a very good article in which this was one of the recommendations (along with other ideas). The article cited research supporting the use of single word speed drills for fluency.

I’ll take a look at the link you mentioned when I have some extra time. Also, I’ll try to share some of the ideas from the article once I finish reading it.

Have you had him evaluated by a developmental optometrist? I have no experience with vision therapy, but a number of parents have reported good results.

We’ve been through vision therapy with some success. He didn’t incorporate body work into his therapy and so, for my son, it was limited. AFterwards, he could handle worksheets for the first time but he continued to have problems with tracking. Our neuronet therapist has been working hard with us, once we pinpointed the head/eye differentiation issue and he has made a lot of progress. He actually doesn’t move his head anymore when he reads text (unless he is sick so still not totally automatic) but for some reason pressure for speed makes him revert back into old patterns. I am not sure why (since it isn’t like I tell him to hold his head still) but it clearly isn’t a good idea.

Beth

Hi,

Two points:

First, a kid having difficulty with patterns “may” have a vision problem, even if you have tried to address it. In fact, if a child’s reading improved following vision therapy, that’s probable evidence that there may still be a vision problem, since vision therapy partially addressed the problem in the first place. Vision therapy techniques vary all over the lot, which is why I recommend finding satisfied parents before spending any money.

Second, while vision may have held a child back initially, an older child (4th grade and up, especially) may be seeing just fine, but be refusing to switch strategies. This can be the toughest one to pick up on and the hardest thing to remedy, because kids who have finally decided on a reading strategy that works for them have often gone through three or four years of hell in school and it is going to take some dynamite to get them to change again and risk entering that hell again. They are looking for a comfort zone…survival.

If a child appears to be learning the code…paying attention, giving the right answers, breaking words down when asked, etc., but is not actually improving on a code knowledge test, then he’s not switched strategies (or he still has a vision problem.) You can bank on that, in my opinion. Once they make the conscious strategy switch, they will begin internalizing the code at a relatively rapid rate….they’re kids after all and can absorb new information at an amazing rate….when they want to……Rod