No reading progress in 6 years

Shelly,

I admire you for attempting to find help for this child. Your district sounds like mine. Very caring teachers are not being given the tools with which to really remediate serious learning disabilites. I would say that it might not be a bad idea for this child to have a good outside reading evaluation. He may have auditory and visual issues form what you are saying. I think the parent needs a very good advocate who can help challenge this system to pay for private reading tutoring for this child either in Lindamood-Bell or Phono-Graphix. I’m sure his IQ is just depressed because his reading is delayed and he has not developed vocabulary as his peers have. It is great you are learning Phono-Graphix. Do keep that up. It will be good for all your students with poor decoding. But yes, I absolutely would encourage them to go for a week intensive in PG. It might just give him some hope.

Janis

Hi Shelly,
This boy sounds like a first grader that I worked with about three years ago. I had to drill the basic code words over and over again, segment, blend, segment and blend. I would highly recommend that you talk to the parent about the intensive in florida in PG. This child will take a lot of time to get him reading even without fluidity. I think that PG would act faster than LMB though. From what I have read, it would take hundreds of hours to see some improvement but with PG it might be faster.

Can you explain why you think PG would work faster than LMB? I’ve used both and I would say that LMB is more intensive than PG, therefore better for people with more serious needs in the areas you described.

>….His words dance.

Hi Shelly,

If the kid is telling you that the words dance, then the words dance. He is telling you that he has a vision problem. Someday he may learn to compensate for it, but it is already nearly too late to save his education.

Before spending the money in Florida, call them and tell them he says the words dance and can only read CVC words in sixth grade. They will very likely tell you to get him to a behavioral optometrist and see if he needs vision therapy, which he almost certainly does.

After the vision therapy, the Lindamood Bell will make sense to him, or they can then send him to Florida, or you can try tutoring him yourself, probably with good results…..Rod

I agree that LMB is more intensive only in the area of using exercises that may not be necessary and the treatment of the advanced code is totally different. A student may have severe phonemic awareness but not need all of the exercises concerning the mouth movements and the squares. I have had kids with severe reading problems that PG worked very well and not in hundreds of hours. I worked with one student for only 10 hours and she grasped the concept and LMB told her mother that she would need at least 200 hours of therapy. Don’t think that because PG doesn’t have all of the pieces that LMB has that it isn’t intensive, because it is as intensive as you need. It properly teaches the student to segment, blend and improve auditory processing; as well as unlocking the mystery of the code. The most important part of the program is error correction and I don’t think that most people who teach the program emphasis it enough or do it enough with the student. I would highly recommend that before you do LMB, that you try PG and do the basic code exercises until the student gets it at least 80% of the time. Like LMB, PG appears to change nerve cells into working and the patterns are imprinted on the brain. Another thing, I highly recommend that when you start with the advanced code, that you show him the chart that is in Reading Reflex or the Wordwork book so that he can see all of the digraphs that represents the sound and see how he can remember them. Too many people only teach PG to the auditory sense and not the visual but you should. If you need help, please email me your telephone number and I will call you.

Re “Like LMB, PG appears to change nerve cells into working and the patterns are imprinted on the brain”, I’d love to see those studies. Where can they be found?

I will try to find the two studies and let you know where to find them. I know that the first study is in a book and the second is just recent. The first study is the main one that showed that phonemic awareness is the main reason for reading problems because when given a list of words to decode, the men that were used in the study, had a hard time decoding them and the test, pet scan, showed that there wasn’t a blood feed to the left side of the brain. temporal parietal area, where the ability to match the symbol with the sound is housed. Blood feed going into an area of the brain means that the brain cells are working; obviously theirs weren’t. If you go into the archives on this site and search for my name, you will probably come up with a post that I included an article about NIH funded testing on PG in Texas in which they are doing pre and post pet scans on young students after PG was used to remediate their reading. This is the result of the ‘No child Left Behind’ legislation aproved by congress. All reading programs have to be independently researched to show the school districts what program will work with what child. I am hopeful that PG will be recommended for the lowest 20%. When I come across the research study that shows that nerve cells can change after remediation, I will post it.

Hi,

I had an interesting trek through research a coupld of years ago that might shed some light on what happens.

An experiment on some type of really primitive sea creature, some kind of mussel, showed that he could learn to recognize a warning signal and withdraw his “foot” before it received a painful shock. They would stimulate the mussel somewhere with a tickle of sorts and then shock the foot. Eventually, it learned to get the foot out of the way when it felt the tickle. Now, this was an animal without much in the way of a brain, but it learned.

What I found most interesting is that the experiment only worked when the “tickle” was applied within a very short time window prior to the shock being applied. If the tickle came too early, the mussel didn’t “learn” and kept getting shocked. The same thing happened if it came too late….no learning.

Well, I’ve got a physics undergrad degree and some appreciation for voltage potentials, so I guessed that there was an electrical phenomenon going on here somewhere. If the tickle was too soon, the voltage potential would dissipate. If too late, it wouldn’t have time to build.

So, I started reading web pages that night. I soon found out how a neuron has dendrites and ganglions. Messages are passed from one neuron to another at the synapse, where an electrical current flows through the first neuron’s ganglion down to the synapse, and then, if the right conditions are present, jumps the synapse to the dendrite of the second neuron.

So, I had guessed right on the electrical part. And, what caused the jump across the synapse? Well, it turned out to be the level of voltage potential that had built at the synapse. Furthermore, every cell can have hundreds or even thousands of dendrites reaching out to the ganglions of other neurons. As several of their synapses “fire” they send an electrical charge down to the ganglion, raising the voltage potential at the next synapse. If enough dendrites are involved, the ganglion at the opposite end of the neuron finally builds enough potential voltage to “fire” that synapse, and the process continues.

But, how about learning? For that mussel to learn, dendrites must be making new connections with the ganglion cells of other neurons, so that eventually a series of synapses would be lined up between the “tickled” cell and the motor response cell of the mussel’s “foot.” That is, the tickle would be received by one cell, create a positive voltage which would travel from synapse to synapse until it crossed the synapse to the neuron that was in charge of moving the foot, and it moved!

Again, how about learning? From the reading I knew dendrites both grew and shrunk, but how. Well, by the end of a very late night I had come across studies that showed how dendrites grew toward a voltage potential and shrunk back when none was present.
This is how the mussel learned, and this is why the tickle had to be applied within a very tight window to be effective. The tickle created a voltage potential, causing a dendrite to begin growing toward it.

The shock to the foot also created a voltage potential, causing the foot to move, but creating opposing charges in two areas of the mussel’s circuitry. As that kept recurring, those neurons literally grew toward each other until the necessary connections were finally made and the mussel had then “learned” to pull back his foot at the tickle, saving itself from the shock.

Which is a long way to say, “Proper error corrections are extremely important to the learning process.” When we are trying to get a child to retrieve the correct word, instead of the incorrect word, we are literally attempting to rewire his brain….Rod

Rod, that was amazing. Honestly, I have learned more on this board than in two education degrees. Although your last post is almost more than I can absorb! However, I absorbed the point, thankfully!

So I am assuming that as a child reads with me, I need to immediately stop them at every misread word, right? Should I have them go back to the beginning of the sentence to be sure they have not lost comprehension of the sentence after the error correction?

Obviously this has implications for spelling. My child comes home with things she has written and no spelling is corrected. Isn’t this a mistake? Shouldn’t they be creating a draft, have spelling corrected immediately, and then producing the final draft (this is first grade, by the way)?

Janis

Hey Janis,

I’ve been asking about immediate spelling/reading corrections for years (I have three older kids, grown and gone). My step-son used to spell “white” as “wight” because his teacher didn’t mark it wrong - and that’s what stuck! I have had teachers do it for my kids for a couple of papers after I ask the question (doesn’t last long) - but the line I get is, “We don’t want to stifle their creativity by correcting free-flowing writing.”

So we keep working on it at home, as do you. :-)

Lil

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Exactly, Lil. That is the reason always given. But that’s a hold-over of whole language for sure.

Janis

> So I am assuming that as a child reads with me, I need to immediately stop them at every misread word, right? Should I have them go back to the beginning of the sentence to be sure they have not lost comprehension of the sentence after the error correction?

Hi Janis,

Thanks. By the way, I wrote that from memory and I had a nagging feeling that I was misnaming the output end of the neuron. I was using “ganglion” and I’m pretty sure that I should have been saying “axon” instead, now that I think about it more. It’s dendrites and axons that extend from the neuron, I think, and the synapse is at the junction of the axon of one neuron and the dendrite of a second, with “information” flowing from the axon, across the neuron, to the dendrite of the second neuron. Interestingly, the “information is just an electrical charge. Our brains really are just sophisticated computers in that regard.

As for your question, all you get when you practice making a mistake is “better at making the mistake.” In other words, you build a stronger and stronger bond toward retrieving the wrong answer. In terms of dendrites and axons, with practice you connect more dendrites and “fire off” the wrong answer even faster and with more certainty.

The correction process works at tearing down the wrong connections while simultaneously building the correct ones. However, as with the tale of the mussel (or whatever it was) timing is everything.

There’s a lot of this that I don’t understand, by the way, as illustrated by the ganglion/axon mixup, so read with care…Rod

Not just the word, but you stop them at the syllable where they have made the error. You don’t read for comprehension, just for practice for decoding. I think that this is where many of you are not doing enough, error correction. Let’s take the word surprise, the student says surmise, I say sur…. and then if they can’t figure it out for themselves, I point to the ‘m’ and they say /m/ and then I say what is i-e? and they get the word. If they are still having problems, I give them the word, no frustration. They are still looking at the word so their brain is still making the connection. They will get better with time. When I finish with PG, I do error correction for about three or four weeks. Remember, you are just practicing decoding, not trying to get the student to comprehend. Too much emphasis is placed on that while the kid is trying to practice decoding. If I am using their lit books for decoding practice, good old Edgar Allen, they listen to the piece of literature when I want them to remember what they are reading. All of the lit book is on CD ROMs. This for all students not for the sped classes.

So when does it kick in? I have been doing exactly what you are saying…syllable by syllable for years now. He is better, much better, but still not a normal reader.

Beth

Janis
I think reading error correction should be done immediately. As my son reads I’ll often say “try again” or hold my finger under the word until he decodes it. I give him time to do it himself, or I’ll say something like “What other sounds might that ‘i’ make?”

I believe correction of writing need not be immediate, but kids should be taught to create drafts and learn to edit.

Hi Beth,
I don’t think that kids that have reading problems should be compared to kids that have never had reading problems. My daughter will never read as fast as I do and many others won’t either. I think that we, those on this board, probably learned to read with no problem and are good readers as well. I think that your son may need a lot of time to become a good reader and may never be a great reader. But let’s hope that he can become a good enough reader so that he can comprehend what he reads. This is what you should strive for, not a ‘normal’ reader. Patience and hope, don’t give up.

we are told when our kids first start reading/writing not to correct them all the time. This may work fine for a non-LD kid, but I can see now how all that invented spelling has made life more difficult for my son!

You are right, of course. I guess I was reacting to your error correction for 3 or 4 weeks which I thought implied that then they would be just fine.

Everything helps with my son but no one thing has solved the problem.

Beth

I have always corrected every word while reading. I have let the spelling slide and I can see that was perhaps a bad idea. “Thay” is firmly imprinted in his mind.

Beth

Janis:

A. In reading, oral reading with instant feedback (error correction) is *vital*; this is *teaching* reading, as opposed to loading kids with paperwork and grading by the pound. At first, the teacher/tutor/parent has to do much of the correction; after a while you just give the first syllable, then the first sound, then just an “ahem” to remind the student to check again and self-correct. Twenty minutes a day of oral reading at a vocabulary-restricted level where the child can manage 90% of the vocabulary at first try is a good way to develop.

B. For spelling, compare with a child learning to speak. At first you are happy when the child makes some sort of meaningful sound like “ba-ba”. Later you encourage the child to say single words correctly, then two-word-sentences, then finally full grammatical sentences correctly pronounced. Spelling is output, and is much more difficult than reading which is mostly input. In the first stages of spelling, it is quite good if the child gets the correct consonants in the correct order. By the end of Grade 1 you hope to see vowels, although the student will still probably be weak on the proper vowel combinations for long/short and irregular vowels. End Grade 1/beginning Grade 2 you also want to see digraphs such as sh, ch, th, ng. In Grade 2 you can start to work on putting it all together and spelling at least the most common 500 words or so standardly.
Over-stress on absolutely correct spelling in the beginning stages makes it impossible for the child to write at all and makes the child hate and fear writing. At the other extreme, coninuing invented spelling past the Grade 2 level does the child a disservice, allows bad habits to become ingrained, and shows a lack of respect for a child’s abilities to learn.

Those are excellent guidelines, Victoria. Thank you. Why aren’t people like you teaching future teachers in our universities?!!!

Janis

They won’t hire us because we don’t toe the line and bow to the latest fads.

Oh, well. Looks like the private tutoring business will be a good field for a long time then. :-)

Janis