Progress here too!

Congratulations Beth! You must be so proud of him. It is always nice to see our kids make progress. I am sure his and your hard work had a lot to do with it too. Congrats!

Congratulations!!!…

I can relate to losing ground in comprehension. I am curious what are you doing to help him with that?

I didn’t think my son had comprehension issue until last spring. Then, in third grade, it became clear that he has difficulties making inferences. He gets the sequence of events in a story but not the subtle aspects of it.

I have done a couple things. One is that I stopped answering all his questions. I realized that he had become very dependent upon me and he was often asking me questions that I knew he had to know the answer to. I started using socratic questioning with him.

Second, I started reading stories to him that have a lot of inferences in them. The Harry Potter books are good for that. I ask him questions as we go along. Not too many, or he will tell me this is not school!!!

His IEP next year focuses on comprehension issues. I pushed the resource teacher to add visualizing goals to his IEP. I know she has Visualizing and Verbalizing but for some reason she was not intending to use it, despite comprehension goals. In speech, he is also going to work on inferences.

Privately, we are going to work on visualization with Neuronet. I think this will help provide a foundation that will make school efforts easier and hopefully more effective.

I will consider more V & V work next summer, if I don’t think he has made enough progress. It is never clear how much can come out of a resource room environment with kids with different needs but I wanted to exhaust that possibility first. Also, I plan on using McGuiness’ Language Wise—Increasing Your Child’s Verbal Intelligence with him. I did some last summer but not systematically enough.

Beth

Wow! How inspiring!!!! Your son’s achievement gives me (and I’m sure others here) lots of hope.

Congatulations to you (I know how hard you’ve worked to help him achieve this) and to him to for undergoing all the hard work as well.

Keep it up and I wouldn’t be surpised if you have a Rhodes Scholar! ;-)

Wow, Beth! That is super news! You have done a wonderful job!

Janis

His movement has been substantive. The Harry Potter books measure from 5th to 10th in readability - so that is a challenging book for him -

furious doen’t sound out so nicely - it has that “French” “U” and then three vowels in a row after the “R” - I bet he’d have had no trouble at all with “angry” or “mad”.

Keep up the good work. Ken

You could just about teach remedial reading now, Beth!

Here’s another tool for the ol’ comprehension kit: DR-TA (Directed Reading-Thinking Activities)

Some fellow named Stauffer (1969) did a study where the teacher previews a reading selection with students to identify purposes for reading it and encourages students at several points to conjecture about how the story will develop and then to verify their anticipation by reading. Another chum named Petre repeated the study in 1972 and found that 4th grade students who were taught with this technique showed more quality, high quality, and greater variety of responses than those with a typical basal lesson reading plan. (Harris & Sipay, 1981 p. 485)
I’ve used it a lot (even before I knew the name of it).
:-)

It does not require one to have pre-read the book but I always do pre-read it for vocab & stuff. (I preteach vocab in the classroom.)

Beth from FL wrote:
>
> I didn’t think my son had comprehension issue until last
> spring. Then, in third grade, it became clear that he has
> difficulties making inferences. He gets the sequence of
> events in a story but not the subtle aspects of it.
>

All these little details like for example “you will be early for your funeral, Zinkoff” (I needed to re-read it to my son and “guide him” through this joke). He finally got it, but not at the first reading.

> I have done a couple things. One is that I stopped answering
> all his questions. I realized that he had become very
> dependent upon me and he was often asking me questions that I
> knew he had to know the answer to. I started using socratic
> questioning with him.
>

with you here…

> Also, I plan on using McGuiness’ Language
> Wise—Increasing Your Child’s Verbal Intelligence with him.
> I did some last summer but not systematically enough.
>

Somebody here mentioned a book “Clear and lively writing” by Priscilla L. Vail- I think it has a really nice collection of word games- there are some with categorization, which I hope will help with word retrieval.

thanks for sharing, Ewa

That’s a good idea and not too hard to implement.

Yes, I know way too much about reading for one child, although I am continually learning from all of you. I am thinking of volunteering in my youngest son’s K class after Christmas and working with kids who aren’t picking up material quickly. It is a parochial school and I know both the principal and the K teacher are very interesting in figuring out a variety of ways to reach kids. Volunteers are also very much part of the fabric—you have to volunteer 20 hours a year to have your kid in school there. I think I could have an impact—maybe help prevent some kids from taking the path my own son has. I honestly don’t think K intervention would have prevented my son’s problems—they are too complex—but it could make a difference for some kids.

Beth

Thanks Ken. Harry Potter is really a bit too hard for him but I thought I’d let him see what he could do. He wasn’t that impressed because he wanted me to read it to him.

He has trouble with words like furious–he doesn’t know what to do with a single vowel for a syllable.

The school has used Great Leaps with him and it is part of the many pieces that have helped him.

Beth

..

It has been a long hard road with my son because of his multiple deficits and we’re not there yet. But we’re a far cry from the child whose first grade teacher described as not able to learn and unable to generalize what he does manage to learn!!!

Beth

Beth, I know how much you have done and what an accomplishment! He’s lucky to have a mom like you. I knew your efforts would start paying off. Give him a hug from the LD reading board!

Thank you, Susan. He was my professor. I was in the last M.Ed. class before he retired. He was a remarkable man. The DRTA is elegant and simple. It works. He was also an advocate of language experience and wrote a book for graduate level students on the method.

Today I would like to think that the old language experience stuff might just have some use. At one time I thought it was probably the forerunner of whole language. Today, with renewed emphasis on reading fluency, I have considered taking dictated stories or the like from a student to use for fluency practice.

He also was a great fan of Grace Fernald. He taught VAKT ala Fernald in the university reading clinic. Today, with what we have learned about dyslexic readers processing difficulties, I can see why Fernald’s methods worked. Their drawback was the labor intensity required to implement. You really had to use the technique 1:1 to make certain the student did it correctly.

If you look back into the 60’s and early 70’s, Stauffer was fairly prolific in the Reading Teacher and sometimes Language Arts (called Elementary English). He had a few other good ideas, too.

I’m sure there are more links on the DRTA, but here is one that gives a summary:

http://www.csuchico.edu/cme/educ/BLMC218/drta.html

Janis

nt

Thanks for the faith. I have wondered at times. You were one of the people who really started me down the path of working with my son. I admired your commitment and it inspired me.

Beth

I just love stories like that—to put something else with the name besides just an article. I still think that LEA (reading, not IEP meetings) was the forerunner of whole language. It has some merit in some situations with some learners (not the learners I usually get…Fernald is better suited there.)

LEA has many good points including the fact that children (or any of us) are more accutely interested in what we say…so at least we have attention on our side in using that approach. For regular education (developmentals and mild correctives) I believe it has more application than for a remedial group or full corrective groups.