Seeing Stars - a mom's observation

4 hours? That’s a lot! Does your child go to a Lindamood Center? Moms are allowed to observe? You said “they”. How many teachers work with your son? Thanks for keeping us informed on how your child is doing and satisfying the curious like me : )

Yes , he’s going to a LMB center for a 4-week intensive course. 4 hours per day. He normally works with an OG tutor 2X per week, but progress has been slow, and we wanted to see if we could generate a breakthrough over his winter break. I can’t tell yet if we’ll see that , but I figure any practice is good for him. The way they do it is they rotate teachers (all young rah-rah counselor types) every hour. I think that’s why they can keep him going for so long.

My son can manage 1/2 hour to 45 minutes of the exercises you are doing!!!

Beth

Just curious… why are they asking him to recall letters and not sounds? I understand the strategy of visualization for comprehension but what is this program trying to teach? As far as reading goes, isn’t phoneme manipulation the necessary skill?

Karen,

This sounds great! What do you mean by socratic questioning when he makes an error? Can you give us an example?

Your posts really help me as I try to do this with my son.

They do talk about sounds, but seeing stars is the piece that comes after Lips, when some phonemic awareness is already in place. For him, he pretty much knows the code, so they are working on his visualization skills, and for that they are referring to the letters by letter name. Seems to be OK for him.

Socratic questioning - trying to think of a good example. I knew she was doing it but I’m blanking on remembering the particulars. He made an error, and instead of correcting it she questioned him until he self corrected. Sorry - that’s not much of a description.

I think that learning the letter names has its place; not the priority but certainly worth learning.

The 6 y/o child that I’m working with has finally learned the letter sounds and so has started to decode. However, when I observed him in the regular classroom and I heard him ask his teacher how to spell a certain word, I found that he couldn’t write the spelling that the teacher dictated using letter names. So, I taught him the letter names also. Fortunately, learning the letter names was easier for him after learning the letter sounds. I don’t know why.

The next thing that I’ll use with him is Seeing Stars. I still have to teach him a few letters using the LiPS, but after 3 weeks I think that he’ll be ready. He still can’t spell non phonetic words and sight words is a struggle, so I’ll use Seeing Stars next after 20 weeks of LiPS.

linda w,

in response to your question:

~~~why are they asking him to recall letters and not sounds? I understand the strategy of visualization for comprehension but what is this program trying to teach? As far as reading goes, isn’t phoneme manipulation the necessary skill?~~

Seeing Stars is trying (and succeeding) at teaching automaticity in reading, since we cannot read by sounds alone.

this is an interesting controversy - letter names vs. letter sounds and their place in reading. to be a truly efficient reader you cannot rely on sounds only; you cannot sound out every word and if you only had phoneme manipulation to rely on (even in the beginning stages of reading) you would not become a very fluent reader; you would become very frustrated with the amount of words on a page, as well as the amount of words that cannot be sounded out . i know this is a point of controversy with people, but here is how lindamood bell addresses it and what they do.

lmbell used to start every client who had weak phonemic awareness in the LIPS program. the LIPS program relies on an oral motor method of teaching students to feel the sounds each phoneme makes and teaches labels for each sound. the student learns to manipulate those sounds through the feeling each one makes. these sounds in the beginning are not attached to letter names and many students after time internalize the sounds and are able to apply this oral motor method to reading. others aren’t and the reading process continues to be very slow, even though their phoenemic awareness has improved and they can label the sounds they see on the page. if the student has only LIPS to rely on the reading process can continue to be very slow, though the student is reading decodable words correctly. and many students (like my child) could not get past this oral motor feedback; it worked wonderfully in strengthening incredible weak phonemic awareness, but he couldn’t figure out how to apply it effectively to actually reading a whole bunch of words on a page. there is also the problem of words that can not be sounded out based on this oral motor feedback; lmbell calls them “words that do not play fair.” and this is where Seeing Stasrs comes in.

Lmbells Seeing Stars is also called symbol imagery. yes, students are taught to visualize letter patterns through multisensory exercises; the biggest of which is air-writing. a student starts out with common letter patterns and through repetition learns to see those patterns in nonsense words, real words and just various combinations. the student is asked to manipulate the patterns to some extent (i.e. to airwrite saying the letters, to name the last letter, to say how many chunks the word may have, etc. etc.). these exercies work. lm bell does not totally dieregard the work in LIPS; if students are still not becoming automatic they are reminded to go back to the oral motor. the whole point is automaticity in reading.

i hope this explains a bit about how Seeing Stars works. i realize it may be foreign to some reading instructors. as a paret whose child has gone through many hours of both LIPS and Seeing Stars, i wish we would have done more Seeing Stars in the beginning. and i know it works amazingly well. the lm bell programs have taught my child to read where other programs have not and they are nothing short of a miricle in my book. albeit a very pricey one.

i will post more later on socratic questioning and more on the above if i did not explain it clearly.

Thanks for jumping in. My son has had decent phonemic awareness for a while but is an unbelievably slow reader. We tried doing fluency work last summer (great leaps) but it seemed like there was a missing piece betweeen the phonemic awareness and becoming a reader. I think, and hope, that seeing stars is that piece for him. Knowing the letter sounds ( and the advanced code of vowel pairs, special endings et al) has gotten him to a point, but we are hoping this will help him break thru to the next level.

I had the LMB people review his spelling words from school with him yesterday. I’ll let you all know if it had any impact on his spelling test today at school.

We are still waiting to see what the results of this intensive intervention is. The LMB center will do post testing, but I’m curious how it plays out in real life. The one thing I can say is that he has been very cheerful about going, which is a tribute to the teachers. They are all very young, educated and enthusiastic. There are several male teachers and I think my son thinks this is very cool.

In an ideal system, letter names would be the sounds and there would be an exact correspondence between sounds and letters. This is true in some languages (and more true in French than English). However all languages change over time and the names and sounds drift apart in time.

I always teach *both* names and sounds. Kids need sounds to do phonics and read independently, and they need names to communicate with the larger world. Besides, the names of the vowles are their so-called “long” sounds anyway so they are needed. For kids I’ve started with, this has never been a problem. For kids who have been drilled and drilled in letter names before I get them to teach them sounds, it’s a lot harder and especailly the letters c and g are a real fight.

Is this why my son who knew his letter names before he was 2 had so much trouble with letter sounds?

He used to sound out the words with the names. I never thought he had an auditory problem but he had trouble identifying those sounds. This has to be why. Too much with the letter names too soon.

My other son’s preschool teacher asks the parents to not do letter names she is introducing the sounds and feels they should get those first.

Sounds first is a good idea. Unfortunately the kids are almost all exposed to Sesame Street and Between the Lions and Reading Rainbow and all those other things that you hope will be good for them, not to mention older siblings and adults using letter names constantly, so in the real world you have to admit to the existence of letter names or cause confusion where you meant to be simple. If a child says “jee” or “aitch” or “doubleyew” I say “Good, you know it, that’s its *name*; now what’s its *sound*?” No reason to be negative, just be clear.

Hi,

I doubt very much that teaching a child letter names first will set him back very far, if at all. In fact, research indicates that kids who learn letter names before beginning schooling do better at reading than those who don’t. Granted, this probably means that the parents were more conscientious, but it also tends to indicate that these kids didn’t suffer any for learning letter names first.

This is probably because there is a tremendous amount of phonics content within the letter names. As Victoria says, five of them represent the long vowel sounds that they need to know anyway. Plus, b, d, p, t, v and z just tack “ee” onto their sounds, while j and k tack “ay” on, and c and g both are their soft sounds plus the innocuous “ee” again. It would take a pretty poor instructional method to fail to easily show a child how to derive the sound of the letter from all ten of these.

Then f, l, m, n, s and x are just /e/ plus their letter sounds, so we’re up to 21 of the 26 letters that give very direct clues to their associated sounds, leaving h, q, r, w and y for a teacher to have to deal with. Not a big deal.

From another perspective, I generally work with some of the lowest readers, and I’ve simply never seen prior letter name knowledge be much of an impediment. Sure, it happens, but it’s never been anything even remotely approaching an insurmountable problem.

I do think, however, that names and sounds would be difficult to teach together, and would teach a first grader sounds first if he came to school knowing neither letter names nor their sounds.

For what it’s worth….Rod

Actually, Rod, I see this all the time. I’d suggest you should probe for it — it isn’t a big obvious thing, just that certain kids are very slow and inaccurate decoders and bad guessers, and when you get into the details you see the pattern of wrong info in their decoding, and a general mistrust of decoding because it doesn’t work for them. The old “well, he doesn’t learn that way” line — of course it doesn’t work because he never really learned it! I have a large number of kids who say “s” for c and “j” for g and “ai” or “ch” for h and so on. It is difficult and a real nuisance to unteach — habits die hard, and habits practiced constantly from age 5 to 8 are generally lifelong; which is why it is a very good idea to teach the idea of letter sounds early.
I have never had a kid of any age or ability who was confused by hearing both name and sound; in fact most of them are very relieved, because they aren’t getting contradictory information any more. I specify “This is the *name* and this is the *usual sound*.
Watch kids’ TV programs with an eye for this contradiction — they say “ay - ay -ay” and then “aaaaapple” — no wonder kids aren’t getting decoding.

Yes, it takes a little longer to teach the extra information, and it takes a little while for the student to get everything clear, but the big payoff is that you don’t have to unteach and reteach everything, a saving of about two full years of time.

Hi victoria,

This is another one of those conversations that threaten to turn into hearing what we want to hear instead of what someone is really saying…..

First, I agree with you completely about teaching sounds, though I’m not sure about teaching names and sounds at the same time as most of the kids I teach already know the etter names….no personal experience in that regard.

Second, I do not see the problem you see with any of my kids lasting beyond just a bit of initial confusion, with the exception that kids do say /j/ for “g” and /s/ for “c” because many times they are /j/ and /s/ respectively. They just haven’t figured out when “c” is /k/ and when it’s /s/ yet….ditto for “g.” However, the problem of confusing name with sound simply doesn’t persist with my kids….maybe a difference in instructional method?…I don’t know. Hard to believe it’s a difference in kids, once you’re beyond 20 or 30 kids….

Third, the real issue I’m trying to address here is whether it is fruitful to attempt to retrain all parents to avoid teaching letter names to preschoolers, which is where these conversations tend to lead, and which is why I’m resisting that direction. There is absolutely no research to indicate that teaching letter names first does long-term damage, and plenty of research indicating no long-term effect at worst, with the possible interpretation that there is even a long-term benefit.

We confuse parents regularly by changing approaches and jargon, and this drives me up the wall because parents should be the schools’ greatest allies in educating children. Sending confusing messages and redoing the jargon every dozen years or so frustrates parental participation. Before we do so regarding the letter name versus sounds controversy, we should have good hard research data supporting the position….and I’ve seen none. If someone has, please post a citation and I’ll read it.

Sure, it would be great if all parents understood sounds and knew how to teach sounds, but that’s asking a lot when many 1st and 2nd grade teachers have a problem with the same task…Rod

I think the answer may lie in the child’s specific deficits. A child who suffers from impaired logic and reasoning has more trouble converting letter names to letter sounds.

Letter names are almost completely illogical,(like so much of our language.) Letter sounds are very logical. Imagine someone coming here from a distant planet and trying to explain the inherent logic in letter names.

“Well yes we call it a y but it never makes that sound, but a b can make the b sound but not all the time and so on.”
I can remember my Irish cousin calling z zed. I told her that was crazy z is spelled z and zed is spelled zed. I guess she could have replied “y is spelled why.”

A child with poor fluid reasoning just can become so lost.

It’s funny, I spent much more time teaching my son letter sounds than names, and in his specific case, I don’t think it made a huge difference.

As a matter of fact, I had a “phonics” tape from Discovery Toys that went over the letter sounds and I played this for him ALOT at bedtime when he was a preschooler. (By “alot” I probably played it two weeks per month over a 2-3 year period. Other nights I’d put stories in his tape player). Also, when we read through alphabet books I would tell him the letter sounds with the names and stress the different words that could be made with the letter sounds.

My non-ld child learned letters first, had a “whole word”/very little phonics curriculum (although I did supplement with some phonics at home), and my daughter is a great reader.

Looking back I have to conclude that my son would have had a difficult time regardless. And, interestingly, he had a hard time learning to read words with “long vowels” because (and this is my theory) he knew the letter sounds (more often choosing to teach the short sounds over the long ones) better than the letter names.

Overall, regardless of teaching letter names or letter sounds it has been a huge struggle teaching him to read. If I could turn back the clock and start over I would have been much more intensive and multisensory about the whole thing.

But, looking back, even before I realized he had a problem I had wonderful early reading books and spent a lot of time reading, rereading, pointing my finger under words, speaking them slowly and giving him the sound and blending of words. And even with years of this, reading is a monumental struggle.

Linda, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with your first and last sentences.It really does depend on the child’s specific deficits.

Generally speaking, I’d say that children with poor auditory discrimination are better served by learning the sounds first because they need so much practice at it. Also, kids who are incapable of flexing need to start with sounds at the preschool level. My son was one of those kids and, not knowing it, I taught him his letters before he went to Montessori pre-school. He didn’t read till third grade. I certainly don’t think it’s because I taught him letters first but I do think that I further confused an already mixed up kid. He wanted everything to be simple like math where 1+1=2. Period. But of course reading doesn’t work that way and he fought it.

That said, all things being equal, at the Montessori school, I do teach both sounds and letter names to kids new to the school in 1st grade. Those who’ve been in the preschool already know their sounds. Once in awhile, there’s a child who needs sounds only at the age of 6 or 7.

Hi Joan,

Well, this should be a new thread, but here goes….

Regarding teaching style depending upon the specific deficits (and by inference) upon the specific strengths.

You can look at this two ways. The first way….identify the strengths and teach to those. The second way…identify the deficits, and fix the deficits, then teach everyone the same way.

What we have in public schools is the first way. We let auditory, visual and motor problems fester, completely unaddressed in most cases, and teach to the strengths. As a result, we pretty much have chaos, a complete lack of consistency in instructional methods, and the need to use fifth grade texts in high school so that everyone can keep up.

What we have in successful remedial progams is the second. Identify the specific deficits and attempt to fix them. Don’t throw the child into an untenable learning situation without the underlying tools for the task. Build the tool kit first. Then show them how to use the tools.

As I said, this should probably be a new thread….complete change in topic…..Rod

That is why I love audiblox for my 4 year old. He is the star of his little preschool (although I don’t think he had a specific deficit.) His teacher stops me every day to tell me how well he is doing with the skill assessments she does.

He knows his right from his left, he can count his blocks to 10 forward and backwards, he can do the logic piece very well, he is working on the memory piece which seemed a little weak at first, he can balance well one one foot etc etc.

Attacking those core deficits is a great thing. I think doing so sets the stage for learning letter names, sounds and pretty much everything else.

Off we go on this very good new topic. You are absolutely right.

I think with most younger kids you have to go after the deficits. I think with older kids you can still go after the deficits but academics has to play to their strengths or the child will suffer from a poor self image.

Once that happens the child won’t have the confidence to learn anything.