sar,
your posts are very informative, without sounding nosy, i was wondering, how old was your son when you first started rememdiation, what things did he do or not do that caused you to take action,
and how did you come to understand how important the practice time is,
i agree with your observations about the orthographic spelling patterns, i think this spills over to prefixes and suffixes as well, we all see the /ing/ ending or the /re/ prefix but kids who do not see these patterns, do not see them with the ease of the proficient reader,
if this post is too personal, please feel free to ignore it, i work with many parents and i need ways to help them understand the practice time involved,
did you son lack phonemic awareness, ie segmenting and then blending,
was he getting help as young as 5 or 6, who first saw the reading problem, his teachers or you,
how is he doing now, what is your prognosis??
keep posting, we can all learn from you,
libby
Re: question for SAR
thanks SAR, how did you remediate his weak PA, how is his segmenting now, can he do it automatically, what does his tutor do with him, what do you think it will take to get the orthographic patterns to come easier,
i work with lots of 6th graders and i find the ti, ci, sci, ce, tu, t, ia orthographic patterns to be very big stumbling blocks,
reading works such as amnesia, inertia, conscious, etc
my 6th graders always read words with the/or/ pattern in the middle of a word or the end, as /or/ with a long o sound instead of the /er/ sound,
candor is candoor, or assign the wrong sound, or chunk wrong such as defer is def er,
always assigning the wrong sound,
even with the re prefix, when is should be a prefix such as in repellant they say rep, then along comes the word relative and now they say re la tive,
it is these hard MS words that seem to separate the proficient reader from the marginal reader,
take the word, /situation/ that one word is loaded with difficult code,
the t being representative of the /ch/ sound
i had a kid today read the word partially as part i cally,
he could not get past the small word /part/
just curious as to how you handle this type of code now with your son,
any suggestions for me, i get so many 6th graders in for tutoring, these are kids who do fairly well in school but very poorly on standardized tests
libby
Re: question for SAR
Dear Libby
I’m not SAR, but I thought I’d like to suggest something in answer your question to her re. /ti/ /ci/ /tu/ etc.
You should make flash cards with the entire syllable on them. For example tious, tion, cious, cial, tial, ture, tual etc.
Introduce them one at a time. Don’t give them all at once. For example, the first day, show him only tious. Have a list of words prepared cau _____, ambi_____, nutri_____. Have him write in the letters and say the sound /shus/ and then read the entire word he’s written.
The next day add /cious/ in the same way.
You will soon have quite a little bundle of cards. You should flash them to your student at the beginning of every session. If he forgets one or responds with the wrong sound, put that one at the back of the pack and show it to him again.
I hope this works for you. I think it will. I’ve had quite a bit of success doing it this way.
We referred our son in K when we knew he had no PA or feeling for letters as symbols but all the school did was an OT eval. which was ok. We referred him again in 2nd and the school tested him and found he was very bright and was a pre-K reader(no surprise to us). He was tutored privately from the summer of 1st grade until the end of 5th; he did receive some Wilson reading training in school but it was never enough. We have been quite tough on him about doing reading each night and doing all the assigned homework, we never wanted accomodations(except now in 6th the teachers give a lot of kids extra time on tests which he needs). He is an A-B reg. ed. student in a 750 student public middle school. He’s never done any of the home programs discussed on this site; his defict in PA was more quickly overcome than his problems with orthographic processing and still in spontaneous writing his spelling is very poor(but great on spelling tests). He never learned to read or write in cursive and we didn’t push it; now in middle school it doesn’t matter too much. Yes he works much harder than his peers and it takes him much longer but that’s what we are used to. No one ever told us it would take so long or that he would have to work so hard to make progress. Lots of challenges are ahead but his attitude is good and he’s a hard worker. The school tends to give more attention to kids with behavior, attention, and organizational problems than the quiet smart kid who can’t read. If he needs it we will do private tutoring again rather than school based help; the resource room in middle school is for kids with ADHD to get homework help and not specific reading/writing help.