using visualization with single words

Beth,

Is he using is new found ability to visualize concepts to visualize the word? The LMB people say that visualizing concepts and visualizing symbols are different areas of the brain. It shows some real ingenuity on his part to use a skill he already had for a new purpose. Quite creative!

It will be interesting to hear what others think. I think I still would want to have him visualize the symbols but I am certainly no expert.

but my 5th grader has always struggled with names in books and it drives me crazy-its the most often repeated word on the page-how can he NOT remember it

Isnt it Davis who says they have to have a picture for every word to recall it?

Linda,

We’ve done Seeing Stars to visualize letters but also have been doing visualization of concepts with our Neuronet provider. Seems to me he is taking the concept visualization from Neuronet provider and using it on words.

I would rather have him remembering letters too. Seems like his system isn’t very efficient.

Beth

Yes, that is what I thought. He shows a flexible thought process but not an efficient system.

This is something I could see my son doing. He prefers visualizing concepts to visualizing symbols.

Beth,
My son has the same mind-boggling difficulty and it doesn’t make sense to me when he can’t memorize a name or word from one paragraph to the next even after numerous repetitions… and when he can decode it!

I’ve never tried having him draw pictures as you’ve described. That’s a very good idea. In the past I’ve had him stop reading for a moment and just repeat the name over and over (more auditory).

But now that I’m reading SS, I can understand that visual exercises might be more effective (or at least a combination of visual/auditory).

Although I have been having my son use visualization for memorizing other kids’ names (tying the name to a visual image or set of images) and this has seemed to help. It took awhile for my son to start using this regularly, but I am noticing an improvement.

Maybe the answer is that our children just need to become more automatic in using these visualization techniques. And just like with a lot of things, for our kids it’s going to take a little more practice and repetition.

Isn’t that what good readers do..that is initially decode then more and more words are sight words(do you stop and decode each time you read someone’s name in the paper?)…it should become automatic. I look at it more as a memory issue; I think kids with reading issues take thousands more hours of practice to become fluent, automatic readers. If the book is about Orville Wright, it may take reading the book to him, then with him, then he reads it aloud before he learns Orville. Just a thought but it worked with my son. I never cared if he saw letters in his mind or not, I cared about the output. What did help was reading with him with a pencil under each word and stopping and correcting each error. And yes it took thousands of hours, we read every day for 1/2 hour aloud.

We do the reading with the pencil too. I found it made it difference if he did the tracking as opposed to me. This cut down on the miscalling of words.

I see this as a memory issue too. LMB’s Seeing Stars says that visualizing letters helps make words automatic. That is why I am interested in him seeing letters. My husband, who is very strong auditorially, does not see letters. It doesn’t matter for him. I have some mild auditory processing problems—I always see letters—I think it allows me to compenstate to some degree.

What I am puzzled about is his method of remembering—which is quite disconnected from the actual words. It reminds me of what I know about Davis techniques—and didn’t think much of.

Beth

I sometimes wonder how much poor readers rely on their visual memory. I have listened to my husband read books outloud, and I have noticed some astonishing similarities between both my DD and husband. Even my husband will have trouble with words that he is not familiar with. The other night as he was reading a Poe short story outloud I realized he was stumbling over particular multisyllabic words. He was decoding them, and trying various pronunciations, but the accent was wrong and he didnt’ recognize the word in context. I went up and read the word, and he said, “Is that the word? I didn’t know it was spelled that way!” and the other comment on another word was, “I am not familiar with that word, I haven’t seen that one before.”

So this tells me that he and our daughter who makes similar errors, are relying on their visual memory to recognize words that they are reading. Due to my daughter’s speech and language vocabulary issues, this explains as I have worked on her vocabulary, the better her reading and spelling is becoming.

Since he plugged in “Oliver” in the ol’ brain instead of”Orville,” it just says (and is this a surprise? Think not) that his visual memory for the words is more efficient than the decoding process. So, I think he had to intercept the visual process — with something *visual,* not with something on a totally different channel.
After the “unlearning” procedure, sounds like now he sees “Orville” and recognizes it visually. The diff between him & me is he probably isn’t ever-so-quickly parsing out the word and processing “ignore that e at the end.”
It would be interesting to know if he could quickly decode “Cruella de Ville” :-) — transferring the “ville” part of orville there.
I remember reading that Dexter Manley (football player) learned syllables by associating them with pictures, too. Sounds dreadfully tough to me — but I’m auditory.

Hi Beth,
In V/V, the first thing that you do is look at a picture and start describing it and then you go to a word, such as your pet and describe the animal where you see him the most and then you go to a sentence etc. Your son has just started going backward but it is great that he has visualized a word. Improving one’s reading takes time, after all you are changing brain cells. Just relax and enjoy him improvements that he has made and be patient!

So you think this is good…….I thought perhaps it was a compensation strategy for his still less than steller decoding.

We’ve only been doing visualization work for a month now and I am not sure even what I should expect to see.

Beth

Sue,

This makes sense to me. I think he was stuck with Oliver. What was interesting to me was that the first time he saw “Orville” after he drew his pictures, he said Oliver again. I said to him “What about your pictures?” He saw “oh, yeah.” He said “Orville” and never misread it again.

There is a learning center here which uses kids visual-spatial skills in learning. They teach visual images for the “what, there, was,”—all the words that kids have a tendency to skip over. They claim it is because kids have no image for them. I am not sure whether the whole approach is very efficient—much like the football player you talk about—but it is interesting.

Beth

Beth,

I thought of something JLH said once. He said that when he tries to loosen up the thinking of some of the kids he works with it at times becomes to loose. This really stuck with me because that is my son. He is too loose. JLH thought is was good that my son had this flexibility of thought.

I used to applaud his creativity. I now push for a more logical thought process.I have been doing alot of work with him on logic exercises. The one from audiblox and others that I made up myslelf.
It has helped. He has become more logical and not quite so loose in his thought processes. It didn’t take long for him to just ‘get it.’ He has become pretty logical. I see it in his writing and his math.
Interestingly my 4 year old’s teacher constantly tells me that he is the most logical kid in the class. I do this with him as well.

Beth,

I would be curious how do they do that. This sounds a bit like Davis approach with using play dough to create statues et.c. for images for various words, numbers and letters.

Such approach (to use strong visual skills of my son) was suggested by the psych. who evaluated my son, but it was in contrast to what the reading specialist was advising and I was left with no idea what to do…

sar,

yes, that is exactly what it takes, and you are doing what i wish all of my parents understood, the thousands of hours,

i agree 100% with all you are doing,

libby

My son is not the creative type. He is pretty rigid in his thinking so I don’t think too loose thinking will ever be a problem for him!!!

Beth

It does sound a bit like the Davis approach. My son does not have strong visual spatial skills and the attractive thing is that they teach those using a V & V like approach except three dimensional.

I think this kind of approach is a good supplemental one but not one that can replace being taught decoding. Perhaps though it gives kids another way to remember and assess information.

But I may just get the V & V book and use it as followup to the visualization work we are doing with Neuronet. Certainly cheaper!

Beth

I think the visual-spatial approach is very interesting. Especially because there seems to be a segment of kids who have good visual-spatial skills and poor reading (at least my son fits that category and I can recall other people who have described their child in a similar manner - particularly children of engineers…even a reading specialist I spoke to commented to me about the high number of children in “engineering families” who have reading difficulties).

The thing that always surpises me about strengths, is how sometimes an area that’s related can be extremely weak. For example, having visual-spatial strength and having a weakness in “visualization.” I suppose this is an example of the the LD mental inflexibilty. Which is often a root of many problems.

On the IDA web site, click on parents , then go in and follow the links to research funded by the IDA and read the abstracts; there are a few that deal with this issue. My son specifically has trouble with orthographic processing, and still reads slowly, but quite accurately, as he scans the patterns of letters. It took him a long time to learn to write all the letters correctly, and never learned to read the pattern we call cursive.

I think you are right. The picture part is the comprehension. That is why I wasn’t sure I liked my son’s strategy, even though it was effective. But maybe there are ways which people with strengths in other areas can learn to compenstate.

Beth

For his hardest spelling words my son takes a picture of the word with his mind, it works with this week’s words like Fahrenheit and Celsius that aren’t easy words; but he’s working on the letters not the thought. He is a very very poor speller and we’ve given up on that.

agree with you SAR, you seem to have a very straightforward approach with your son, and i respect your honesty

i agree as well with the orthographic pattern being key to spelling and not visualizing the word,

keep posting, i find your posts informative and helps me as a tutor,

libby

Thanks for pointing that out SAR. I’ve learned a lot from you, partiularly because you have so much experience and knowledge about RAN deficit. I haven’t seen the IDA website. I have copies of some of their articles on my desk and you’re right. A big piece of the puzzle is getting children to automatically “see” the orthographic patterns. It’s nice to hear that in time your son has gotten to a point where he can do this accurately.

Some can visualize concepts but not letters. That is my son to a T.

He has gotten better because we work on this. His spelling has gone from being horrible to not so bad.

He wrote 4 sentences last night with only 3 errors. I would say in the beginning of the year there would have been about 7 or 8.
Oddly he still makes errors on words I know he knows. Cood for could. When I point out the cood is spelled wrong he says, “How did I make that error? I know that one.”
I think he uses his phonemic awareness and is not automatic at applying his visual spell check.

I learn English as a second language, and I can say that without spell-checker I will be lost. There is no way I can notice all the errors in my writing. I think it is lack of exposure- I had certainly not written that much in English to remember how words are spelled and certainly not enough “by hand”; for me the kinesthetic element is a strong learning channel.

Recently I spelled “sence” instead of “sense” in my son’s “hard words book”. I did not notice that mistake at all- my thoughts were probably isn’t “since” similar to “sense”? So why there is “se” ending in one and “ce” ending in the other? I think unless I had written “sense” hundred times- I would not remember it’s spelling…so SAR you are right- the phonology can only get you to some point and after that one just needs to remember string of letters…and put them down IN ORDER.

This isn’t something that people learn from courses on teaching reading—it’s more in the psychology of learning with a little reading blended into the mix.

As readers are rolling along in a story, they often mispronounce a name and don’t worry too much about it unless they notice that they don’t understand to whom the author refers. It’s a pretty natural thing.

Then, when we notice our pronunciation error—even after 1-2 pronunciations—our brain wants to continue to command what we’ve already practiced because we’ve “forced it” to fit into our scheme of things (or schema). It takes a big number of correct repetitions to undue a behavior pattern (as I know you know). For things done incorrectly only 1-2 times, you might get by with 9-12 correct & consecutive practices (trials) before it is rote or automatic. If the error is deeply ingrained in memory, especially procedural or episodic varieties or memory, it could take 50 correct consecutive trials to change the rote behavior. That’s why it is so difficult for us to change our morning routines.

Most bright kids do look to “make sense” of the story. If it’s making sense, many don’t sweat the small stuff (like last names) until someone calls it to their attention or it affects their purpose negatively.

So, I think both your feelings are right. While you want them to slow down and decode, you are also very thrilled when they apply a strategy we’ve taught. The Ying and Yang of reading. :-)

Keep reading and having fun with it. Keep up the V & V (and have fun with it). Keep chunking those big words. and have fun with it. A balance for all needed items.

My high school kids took a break from writing at the end of today and had fun factoring quadratic equations. They have fun chunking multisyllable words on other days as an alternate activity from straight reading/writing. One of the tricks is to vary activities so brain stays engaged. Brain loved novelty. A *little* rote drill is novelty.
:-)

S

Nice explanation. I don’t know about the reading is fun part though. I have pretty much accepted that reading will never be fun for my son. It is too much work.

But he is loving the books on tapes I got him through the Blind and Dyslexic Foundation. He loves it more when I don’t have the book for him to follow along with!!!

Beth

Years and years ago a woman named Grace Fernald developed a simple, but effective, approach to remediate dyslexia. You might be able to read her approach on the internet if you did a search on her name. I am relying on my memory, can’t find that old college text.

Essentially the child gave you a word he wanted to learn or you chose one. I like words that are pretty regular phonetically. The teacher wrote the word in crayon on a strip. The teacher then demonstrated how to say (stretching the sounds out, but not really segmenting) the word and trace the word simultaneously. There were specific steps like: say the word, trace the word while stretching, say again and underline. Once the child got it, he traced and said the word as many times as was needed to learn the word. New words were added as quickly as each word was learned. Over time the student needed fewer repetitions of tracing to learn new words until finally the step of tracing the word was dropped entirely because the student did not need it.

Now, obviously really long words were not good choiced initially. Phonetically irregular words were not good choices, either. Usually you began with nouns.

In any case, I don’t think Fernald knew why this method worked (the original VAKT technique), but it did. Today, with the knowledge we now have, I think we can see why it worked. For starters it forced the attention on each letter in sequential order and it indirectly addressed sounds (explicit phonics itself was not part of her approach).

I think we can and do take the best of Fernald and combine it with the explicit phonics teaching as well as elements from programs like Seeing Stars to create good, strong hybrid programs that can help students.

Practicing our mistakes is the reason, I believe, so many of our students have a dreadful time learning to spell high frequency words. They are permitted to mispell them for several years before they get into resource. They have potentially mispelled words like “they” hundreds or at least dozens of times. Breaking this is a real task.

Ditto for multiplication tables. When students sit and do seatwork writing incorrect answers to multiplication problems, over and over again for two years, teaching multiplication tables is made to be much harder than it ever needed to be (and it is hard for our students). It is one thing to see and say a multipliction fact, but writing it brings in the kinesthetic aspect. So, incorrect practice is a double or triple whammy.

This is why I equip them with multiplication charts (at home, in resource and for classroom) and demand that they use them. The amazing thing is that start to know their times tables after spending a year or two using them frequently.

I see exactly what you are talking about with my son with high frequency words. Thay, wint, sed, It makes me scream. Any suggestions?

Beth

My son is tripped up by homophones…I edit his essays and circle the words spelled wrong and he can fix most except for homophones. His school uses Project Read for spelling and it is good, but to spell correctly while writing an essay is difficult for him and we have given up for now. Many of his nonLD peers and his very bright 4th grade brother spell just as poorly.! I think you pick and choose your battles and this is one we are not pushing now. One the other hand his handwriting is very clear(printing) and neat and it came through maturity and practice only.

Our teacher commented *again* to me that in reading group my son looks away from the book when others are reading. Duh. The kid loves to hear stories, and following along is n’t as pleasurable. This is not to say that ds isn’t doing much better when its his turn to read.

..

Except that they have to be able to spell close to the word for a spell checker to work!!! My son isn’t there yet!!! My goal is to get him good enough for a spell checker!!

Beth

Just keep working away at it; I think spelling is the least of your worries. I have pushed reading fluency, writing, math and luckily he’s naturally organized and quite social. Middle school teachers are pretty flexible about spelling(except all those names and places in social studies). I would put strong organizational skills and social/group leadership skills far above spelling.

That’s where I am, too, Beth! He has a Franklin speller written into his IEP - but can’t access it because he can’t spell well enough to get the correct word back out!

dang!

That’s what we use.

BTW, can’t you misspell the words in social studies? Can’t get an accommodation? She’ll never spell Yugoslavia, or Portugal. It ain’t-a-gonna-happen.

Is that a problem?

Leah,

He is 10 years old, in fourth grade, and can’t spell “bird.” For him the “r” controlled vowels always have the “r” first (or “frist”) for some reason I can’t fathom. The Franklin speller tries all kinds of things that start with the two consonant blend - but it just doesn’t understand the way my son spells.

One would be to create a word list of several high frequency words he is working on. Type several copies and have them where he can always get to one: at home in room, in desk at school, in resource room. Then the instructions are something like: “you are responsible for spelling these words correctly. You have this word list and you are permitted to use it any time, you MUST always check these words and spell them the way you see them on the list.”

To reinforce you can provide the child with something when you see him consulting the list, or when the word is correctly spelled in print. To provide guided practice, create daily dictation sentences that use the words, have the child place the word list on table top and use while writing. Gradually work through high frequency words in this fashion.

If we don’t insist and hold the students accountable, most of them will continue in the same “sloppy” manner.

When the first several words are pretty well always used correctly in writing, then select several more. Keep this going.

Was it really so important that the name Orville be spoken correctly. If it was an oral book report I guess it would matter but if it was a written report it would only require that it be spelled correctly. People with reading difficulties often get hung up on names but it is my opinion that only Orville’s mother ( and perhaps Orville) would really care if his name was pronounced correctly. I tell my students to read the name the way they see it and keep going. The meaning of the text should not change on the basis of a proper name. After all we are looking for meaning more than word calling. However, how clever of your child to find his own way to remember the name. Congratulations to him and to you.

It’s funny but my non-LD child who is in Honors English spells as bad (if not worse!) than my LD child. Although I have to say that as she gets older her spelling is improving. I blame some of this on her school not using phonics. They had a very poor reading program when she was in the lower grades.

With both my children the only thing that helped was to go over spelling words on a daily basis. I use a dry erase board and each night we “test” and then go over the words “piece by piece.”

With my LD son I’ve added more multisensory stuff like air writing and discussion about word patterns (orthographic patterns). I feel spelling is important for him because seeing, writing and learning to recognize these patterns helps him with reading. With my daughter, I didn’t feel spelling was as important because she had no trouble reading.

I agree; what trips up my 6th grade son is essay writing as a test(timed) where he has to compose, write neatly and try to spell. I think he “hears” the word but writes the wrong homophone. Most middle school teachers are understanding. Yes, we make him memorize the names and places in social studes, he just did early man, and Australopithicus Africanus was one and he does learn those. He’s getting better at looking at the letter patterns in words. No, he doesn’t receive any special accomodations but a LOT of middle schoolers are poor spellers.

Lil, my 14 year old freshman son does that very same thing. Here he is in high school and you will see things like frist for first, gril for girl, ect. His overall spelling is really terrible though, he has lots of reversing the order of the letters, sound substitutions (especially vowels), and just plain old so off base you don’t know what he is trying to spell. He was allowed to use “inventive” spelling in his old school district while in elementary—this did the kids no favors. He has been working on his spelling skills in his reading skills class so hopefully by the end of the year we will see some improvement-at least enough for spell check to know what he is trying to spell. Good luck to you and your son.

Actually, he has to present the book report orally so it is an issue, although I must admit I had not thought of that. I was much more hung up on him reading it correctly.

Beth

Tell us more. Can you use them on a regular computer? It sounds like it could be a godsend.

Beth

This is a good idea. Yesterday, he spelled there as “thare”. I said that’s not how you spell it. He said, “oh, yeah.” And he fixed it!!! For him, that is a major change—to actually know how to spell something. Now we have to get it automatic. I think your idea might help.

Beth

Yes, I use the stretching sounds and tracing approaches along with explicit phonics. Works very well.

Try repeating, chanting, tracing, sounding out the “spelling pronunciation”, and going over one word from every possible viewpoint. If you learn one word a day, that’s two hundred in the school year.

Beth, I am convinced that it does matter. First we skip names because “nobody” cares. Then we don’t worry about all those “little” words like a and the and or. Then we don’t worry about substitutions like “Daddy” for “Father” as long as the meaning is OK. And then we don’t worry if kids leave off plurals or change verb tenses or even re-form whole sentences. So what if the kid is making up his own story from the picture, as long as he’s enjoying the book? And voila, we’ve got “whole-language”, because that is how they supposedly teach — and how well has it worked for you and for all the others out there??
Reading is often defined as getting meaning from print. A proviso needs to be added that the meaning you are getting should be the same as the generally understood meaning that everyone else gets, and the meaning has to come from the print and not the picture or your imagination.
As a teacher of all levels, including high school and college math, I see a disaster avalanching through the education system. Kids are taught that it’s fine to say a word any way they like or to substitute a familiar word for an unfamiliar one, such as Oliver for Orville. Then they get into high school and are supposed to make fine distinctions, as in chemistry between sulfate and sulfite (different chemicals) and in literature between has been and had been (different times) and in math between X2 and X3 (different variables) and in French between avais and avait (different people) and avions and avons (different tenses or moods) — well, it’s just chaos. The kids are frustrated, and they are angry because the teachers are contradicting everything they’ve been taught for eight years. The teachers throw their hands in the air and say they would like to help, but there is barely time to teach the math or chemistry or French, and they can’t also make up for eight years of reading instruction plus a huge chip on the shoulder. Parents are screaming because kids have to pass exams that assume they can actually read and can learn high-school level work. And those exams often depend on exactly the kind of detail listed, especially if they are multiple-choice.
Yes, accuracy counts. And the time to learn to do it right is at the beginning, so doing things right is a habit, not some strange idea from Mars. Of course we have to be reasonable and patient and accept that beginniers won’t be perfect, but the time to error correct is when the error is made, noit after eight years of practicing doing it wrong.

As far as the child’s visualization trick, well, I fear it is terribly inefficient. I work again with all levels and many subjects, and I often have to stop kids using various “quick tricks” that they have learned over the years. A trick may be quick the first time and for one special situation (and yes, I myself do recite “Thirty days …”) But when a student gets the brain loaded up with several thousand tricks, they are no longer quick. In fact the tricks themselves become a huge weight to drag along and cause more trouble than they ever solved.
I have just started working with a student in Grade 6 whose family called me in about study skills. He reads OK but not well, but he spells by copying letter by letter and has very little idea of sound relating to spelling. So it takes him four times as long as it should to do a piece of work, and he is paying so much attention to spelling out letter by letter that he loses all track of the topic of the reading, or the purpose of the exercise. Other students do math by tricks such as counting on the fingers — vastly error-prone when you run out of ten fingers, and excruciatingly slow above twenty. Others have memorized five hundred formulas — which would be fine except the memory spits half of the wrong formula. It ain’t quick.
I would strongly recommend working on a hundred common sound/symbol patterns instead of several thousand pictures. It is far more effective in the long run.