Has Anyone Ever Seen An Older Child "Catch Up"?

A person can memorize enough words to get to about a third grade reading level. Whole language is used at many schools. This program teaches kids to memorize and guess.

Your child needs to learn to develop phonemic awareness and learn to segment and blend.
I taught my child these skills with the book reading reflex. He moved 3 grade levels in 6 months.

Hi Nancy,

You might have your daughter checked for auditory processing, too. My son has that disorder, and I am convinced that is why he has trouble reading. He did well through third grade, but is having trouble keeping up this year in 4th grade. Go to “LD In Depth” and check “processing disorders” (I think) to see if any of that fits your daughter.

Of course, the only way my son had any chance to learn to really read was the book Linda recommended to you - “Reading Reflex.” :-) I like this book for children with auditory processing disorders, because it teaches one SOUND at a time, rather than one RULE at a time - worked for him! :-) I understand it works well with all kids, by the way.

Lil

Just as Linda and Lil mentioned, you should probably try Reading Reflex first. It’s inexpensive and made especially for parents to use at home. There’s a test in the front of the book which should help you identify your daughter’s weaknesses. You can find the book at most book stores (my Barnes and Nobles always has a copy in stock) or you can order it on Amazon (I never have the patience to wait for anything in the mail! ;-)

Many parents who use this book report that their child has made tremendous progress really quickly.

If after you’ve finished the book and your daughter has had lots and lots of reading practice and she’s still not progressing, that would probably be a good time to look into vision therapy or other things.

I believe older children can “catch up,” but not without help.
Good luck to you! There’s lots of good information and wonderful suggestions here on this site. :-)

processing disorder have difficulty understanding what is read to them? My daughter understands very well when someone reads to her, also has a very good memory for details & facts she hears from either a lecture format or educational show, or basically anything that someone tells her- not so good when she reads them herself.

There are a lot of different sub-types of auditory processing disorders. My son also is an auditory learner - but when there is a lot of background noise, or two competing signals (two people speaking at once), or something taped or on TV has a bad sound track - his brain doesn’t process the information correctly. He also has a speech articulation problem, and was in speech therapy for two years.

It might be a wild goose chase - it was just a thought. :-)
Lil

Over the years I’ve literally seen thousands of significantly behind children catch up in their reading. Some children catch up extremely fast with a minimal intervention, some need considerable help. What you need is someone in your area you trust to make some recommendations that won’t cost you a 2nd mortgage.

My thirteen year old son has made tremendous progress
over the last year. Really doing nothing different than
we have been doing for the past seven years but something
clicked.
Hang in there!

I tutored a girl who was going to be held back unless she had summer reading and was ready for fifth grade reading. When I started with her she was capable of reading at a beginning first grade level! She desperately wanted to go to fifth grade with her friends and was willing to do whatever she had to to learn better. We met three times a week for 45 minutes; she read, played games and did homework the other two days.

First I checked her basic phonics ability — beginning with simple alphabet sounds. She had so many missed skills, it surprised her as well as me. It made me think of swiss cheese, or a ladder without all the rungs. We made a plan for how we would proceed. I didn’t have to teach the skills she knew, just the missing ones. This helped us go faster. Her lessons included listening to tapes, playing phonics games with me, reading with me and to me — simple books to start. As she learned the sight words in the order they are most often used, and more phonics she advanced to higher level books. She was so excited, she wanted to read to her grandparents (she was living with them) or play some of the games I had previously played with her. We went to the library and found the Judy Blume books. They were too hard at first, but the content was exactly right for her, so we read them together. I made notes of what she stumbled over, and those needs became the next lesson. Soon her grandparents had to make her stop reading and go to bed! What a joy for all of us.

She did get to mid fourth grade reading and was allowed to enter fifth grade. Today she is a college graduate student.

In the meantime, I wrote this program, “You Can Teach Someone to Use” in book form for others to use. It’s available at most bookstores.

Woops! The name of the program I just wrote about is “You Can Teach Someone to Read”.

>>Your child needs to learn to develop phonemic awareness and learn to >>segment and blend.
>>I taught my child these skills with the book reading reflex. He moved 3 >>grade levels in 6 months.

Nancy,

take Linda’s advice, it is the best in this thread, it is surprising how well a 2yr deficit can be hidden with older kids, no other program will fix an older child quite like Phono Graphix, it is easy and simple and quick

when will this deficit finally show itself???

on a standardized test,

and then you will hear your child’s teacher say things like, “your child does not test well’, “this test does not measure what we did this year” and on and on,

my state of Penna gives a state test called the PSSA, the first time this test is given is at the end of 5th grade, this past Fall i have had a steady stream of calls from parents of kids who did poorly on this test but are getting A’s and B’s in school

most of these parents are in denial and cannot believe their kid cannot read well, while we all find fault w ith these standardized tests i DO believe they are very accurate in pinpointing a decoding deficiency

good decoders do well on these tests, good decoders can read words they have never seen or heard before, and this is what is required on these tests and this is what is required to gain a good reading vocabulary,

i also use the Burns and Roe Informal Reading Inventory, i test my kids with it sometimes and it mirrors the results of the standardized tests

poor decoders eventually end up 2yrs behind like your child, fix it now, start working on her decoding skills

while i see many people recommending many supplementary programs to “practice advanced code”, none are necessary

peruse your daily newspaper, Time, Newsweek, Sport Illustrated, etc and gather a good bunch of MS words to practice with

i often use the Sport page of the newspaper, find an article about a sport that your son or daughter is interested in and read it

there are many ways to find practice materials without buying more programs

i suggested to one family of a 3rd grader that her family have o-e week, all the kids in the family and the parents look for words with the sound o-e, clear off the ice box and have paper and markers there, have everyone put up their o-e words

see who finds the most, get dad involved too, find easy and hard ones,

find homophones too, they are fun for ex, hole/whole

make analogies with some of these o-e words, make sentences and leave out the o-e word and see who can complete the sentences using the words taped up to the ice box door

make up short poems using these o-e words etc

write jokes or riddles using these o-e words,

keep them up for about a week or two, when eating dinner or lunch or breakfast, everyone can see these words, talk using them, read the cereal box, see if it has any o-e words,

always read the newpaper headlines, the Phila Inquirer had the word /awry/ in its headlines one day, i can imagine how many people misread this word!!

when your kids play Nintendo, sit with them, make them read the onscreen directions, most poor decoders skip these, and most parents never watch their child play these games, big mistake, get involved and read the stuff on the screen

read the comics, anything, why buy a program to “practice advanced code” when we are surrounded with it in our daily lives,

if reading is taught as part of our daily life, it is way more fun, using a program to practice reading makes it work

buy a good new board game, have your child read the directions and teach this game to the family,

another good one for middle school kids, buy the Estes Rockets available in hobby stores, have your child read all the directions and figure outhow to build the rocket

then take him to hobby store, if finacially able, buy the launcher, some engines and blast it off, my boys spent three full summers doing just this, we blasted rockets and had more fun, we still talk about it,

if you can bring reading into your child’s everyday life, she or he will make good gains, but fix the decoding first with PG

then start enjoying the world of words, keep it fun, get a good book, have the whole family read it outloud, each night a member of the family can read from it

if it is a Harry Potter book, after reading it, go see the movie, then compare them

i had a mother and student read one of the Zak files book, it had a character named Mrs Wolfowitz, she told me they were driving one day and both of them spotted a lady on the street who looked just like the character described so enjoy, you need few materials, just a good imagination

libbyin the book, they both made the connection, but how good for her son, now this is how comprehension comes alive in the real world,

they both compared the lady on the street to the description in the book,

very cool and very good of this mom,

sorry, bottom of post somehow got scrambled when posting, libby

n/t

Where in Penna are you from???

except for the slow reading -mine races. The school feels he is doing well-he receives mostly Bs and I want to believe them. BUT the monthly book reports have been an eye opener.

He tests at a 4th grade level, so we choose a 4th grade book. He struggles or forgets too much by the time he is at the end to do the report. We end up getting a 2/3 grade book with illustrations to complete the report assignment. To me, this is where he is able to read.

We did Reading Reflex over the summer except for the last chapter(multisyllables are important but we ran out of time) I found he would rather guess than decode while reading regardless of how well he did in lesson time. Now we have a reading tutor who is very experienced and is also convinced his greatest need is decoding; we are 12 sessions in. He does well in the sessions-is far more cooperative with her than me- and I feel it is helping his speech, but I cannot say I have seen any differences in his reading level.

Tutor recommended the school provide Fast Forward=school says they no longer provide it as there is no research for long term benefits and he is probably too old for it to make a difference.

I understand your question so much right now; this latest part just happened this week. I feel like he will NEVER read at grade level and that at age 11, everyone just wants to pretend hes doing better than he actually is because hes ‘over the hill’ somehow and thats all that can be done

I hope you have better luck with the decoding than we did-perhaps a slow reader is more likely to use it as it will speed them up. For my son, it slows him down and he simply won’t do it unless someone is forcing him to.

Best wishes

n/t

posted to you via email using your email address,
libby

I would not go to a 3rd grade book but look for a 4th grade level book that is shorter. He needs to work on fluency and rate. Many kids that have problems with what looks like memoory is really their rate of reading. They read so slowly that they forget the beginning. I would get short passages of 4th grade level text. Let him practice reading them out loud and to himself. Then time him for 1 minute, circle where he stopped and then do it again. Then, listen to him read and mark the errors while you time him. Graph the words per minute and the errors. Do this every week and challenge him to get the wpm up and the errors down. This is very motivating to most kids and they will practice to get the graph to go up. I do this every week with my students. They read orally to each other and I time. A 4th grader should be able to read 120-150 wpm.

Is the 120-150 wpm cold?

Beth

nt

:(

This is oral reading and they do not read cold. I have them read the passage silently. Then, read to a partner for time, then try to beat the time again and finally I time and the partner records the errors. I may be a little high on the wpm. I am doing this from memory. I will look it up and post the rates. I know that my eighth graders should read at 180 wpm. I will verify and report back.

I found an article here on Ldonline about rate and fluency. there is a chart with suggested reading rate for each grade level. Here is the link.
http://www.ldonline.org/ld_indepth/reading/reading_fluency.html

If she processes words by their meanings and not by their sounds, then she’ll understand what’s spoken or read to her… but it will have been more difficult for her to figure out the “code” for reading which requires us to understand the little fragments of sounds that letters stand for, instead of the meaning behind whole words.

If you are having to work at the decoding part of reading, you can’t “hear” it as if someone were reading it to you. It can sometimes help a whole lot just to know that that’s what should be happening — and so, to re-read if you need to, and read it like a story to yourself.

Oral reading rate potential varies greatly with the reader/culture, etc. The ear of the listener is critical in determining if the rate is adequate. The rates chosen are well-established, but one shouldn’t become so “anal” as to believe scores under those established rates are indicative of failure. By listening to the flow of the reading and gauging the comprehension, you will be closer to determining if the reading is fluent or not.

My then 12 year old was 3 years behind in all reading skills. They wanted to hold her back but I prefered to have her tested and remediated. Imagine, a kid with a superior IQ who was never, ever given any remedial help and they wanted to hold her back! 80 hour of Lindamood Lips and Fastforword and she was reading at level. It was expensive, but worth it. I’m not sure Fastforword helps all kids, but mine felt she was finally able to follow the lectures in class, it improved her auditor processing. If your tutor is a teacher, she can become a Fastforword provider for about $90, you can learn over the net.