An old topic, I know, but I wanted to check in with you all and make sure I’ve got my bases covered. Here’s the snapshot:
In the year since finding out that my son is LD, and finding this board, we’ve had him tutored weekly by an OG tutor, had him complete 4 weeks of Interactive Metronome, had him begin psychotherapy, and recently had him complete 68 hours of LMB (seeing stars) . I’ve tried to hit the motor planning, attnetion, anxiety and decoding problems.
He can now decode grade level multisyllabic words. His comprehension is , and always has been, above grade level. He reads with reasonably good prosody. But SO SLOW!! He still confuses some words (like off/ of) but less frequently, and corrects himself more often. For some reason he’s been reading “said” as “and” - no idea why.
I plan to re-introduce timed readings ala Great Leaps, but I’m not clear on whether more Seeing Stars work would improve his fluency by virtue of making the reading/decoding more automatic?
Would slowness , even when you can decode, be an indication of a RAN deficit?
I also am taking him next week to the Optometrist finally, because I do detect him moving his head slightly when he reads and I think there may be vision issues here as well.
Trying to leave no stone unturned! Thanks!
Re: Improving fluency... again... : )
Karen,
I think the work I have done to help my son’s eyes improve has had an effect on his fluency.
Less effort to overcome his ocular motor issues has made everything easier.
Re: lots of oral practice with error correction
We have done this also. You have to be careful though that you don’t just read the easy, comfortable books with him though. My son improved his automaticity but forgot the code—because there were few words that he had to decode.
I know someone’s whose daughter had normal fluency from doing eye therapy followed by PACE. We saw no such benefits. I think it depends on what the underlying reason for the slow reading is. My son’s is much more related to RAN and we saw more benefit from Neuronet. He tests normal on RAN tests now.
Also, we saw that IM made other things easier. You might find your son makes more progress with Great Leaps, now that you have done IM.
Beth
Re: Improving fluency... again... : )
Karen N. wrote:
>
> A For some reason he’s been
> reading “said” as “and” - no idea why.
>
Are you talking about my son ? :-))
I had him “write” on a rough paper “and” and “said” and say (at the same time_) “said” starts with “ess”. We did it every time we read for a few days and it seemed to “cure” the problem.
Since that (last summer) he mixed them maybe once and self-correct instantaneously.
We liked doing timed fluencies as described in the article by Phyllis Fisher posted by Sue from “resource room”.
http://resourceroom.net/Sharestrats/IDAdrillarticle.asp
My son liked the graphing of his accomplishment and liked doing the drills even a few times a day. I used words from Dolch list (the most common words in English listed by frequency of occurrence).
Ewa
Re: Improving fluency... again... : )
Hi Karen,
I don’t have any words of wisdom . We’re in the same boat. But it sounds like you’re covering a lot of bases.
Checking on vision, continuing to practice decoding skills and plenty of repeated readings (timed and untimed) should help.
I wish there was an easier answer for all of us.
I don’t think there is a quick packaged solution; we read 1/2 hour a day of easy, comfortable books for 4 years to increase my son’s fluency. If your son is only in 3rd grade, you have lots of time to improve this before the crunch of middle school reading. I corrected every error and used a pencil to follow along. If your son is very bright as is mine, comprehension, inferences and the like are not where you need to spend the time. The trouble with school is that after 1st grade they don’t do oral reading, so there’s no error correction with kids who misread words. My son will always be on the slower side for reading(about 20th percentile for rate on the GORT), but we keep plugging away at it. Video games with text on the screen that you have to read before it goes away have also helped. For some reason oral reports in school are not a problem and he can read those aloud at a normal pace.