Last summer I started seeing a little boy (6) with serious phonemic awareness problems 3 times a week. This little boy is as severely phonemically disabled as anyone I’ve ever come across in my experience (20 years plus) I did nothing but the Lindamood mouthforms and a lot of sound manipulation exercises for a full month before going to anything written.
At the end of the summer he was getting to the point where he was pretty consistently OK with the single consonants and short vowels and was starting to decode and write CVC words.
Once school started we went to once a week, and it’s been downhill all the way ever since. In October his mother showed me a list of 100 so-called sight words he was supposed to know. Of course he hadn’t a clue about any of them (except “to” and “the”). To make it worse, he started calling the letters by their letter names rather than their sounds as I had taught him. As a result, his decoding skill, which had been progressing slowly but surely in August, became non-existent.
To make a long story short, this has been a horrendous termfor him. Nothing’s been accomplished - either in tutoring or the classroom.
Now, I’ve finally been contacted by the classroom teacher. Both she and the principal want to see what it is I’ve been trying to do.
I need some suggestions about what I could take to show them. Any ideas at all would be welcome. I can’t make it too involved though. I need a couple of reasonably short information articles or ……? I don’t think they’re going to be big on anything that involves a lot of expense or work for them. No one in this school has ever heard of Orton Gillingham, Lindamood Bell, or any of the other rememdial language programs. It’s a great opportunity - and I don’t want to blow it.
Meeting takes place Monday AM. Looking forward to some feedback from the excellent minds on this website.
Re: Information for Classroom teacher and principal
Susan,
We were given that booklet at the opening of school special ed.meeting and I was delighted! It is very, very good. However, my special ed. director still sees no need to send anyone for training in OG, LB, etc. :-(
Janis
Re: Information for Classroom teacher and principal
Eleanor,
this might be useful:
http://www.schwablearning.org/pdfs/expert_hall.pdf
It is a series of 6 Qs (for example: what are the components of
effective reading instruction? or “warning signs” et.c. ) answered by Susan Hall is co-author, with Louisa C.Moats, Ed.D., of “Straight Talk About Reading” and “Parenting A Struggling Reader”.
It is quite easy read.
Re: Information for Classroom teacher and principal
Sounds like he may have alot of other issues going on with him that are preventing him from learning? Addressing those issues first may speed up reading remediation.
My dd was sort of same way. Her K teacher told me she had never run across anyone as ‘unteachable’ as my dd(she was 5.5 at time). She couldn’t remember the name of or the sound of A, B, C after going over and over and over. We did LMB for 4 mo and I didn’t see any improvement.
Turns out she had extremely poor word discrimination and her memory was that of a 3yr old, when she had just turned 6. Once we addressed those issues (we chose Tomatis, Earobics, Brainbuilder ) she took off- literally within 2-3mo. she was reading. She was actually placed in the top reading group going into 1st grade. She’s now about middle in 3rd - still has issues, but wow - what a difference.
I have two ideas for you:
First, There is a very good (and free) book from the National Institute for Literacy and the U.S. Dept. of Education called “Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read.” It was published in September, 2001. The book can be downloaded at www.nifl.gov
Second, there is a Lindamood-clone for classroom teachers entitled “Pathways to Reading.” The author is Terry Clinefelter. She does have a website.
I personally like the downloading of this book. It is clear and totally based on the findings of the National Reading panel. There are sections on P.A., phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension.