How do I get reading teacher to help child sound out words?

I graduated with a masters in learning disabilities and did not know anything about segmenting and blending (whole language ruled at my university in the mid 90’s). I learned everything I know about teaching reading due to my frustration with everything I didn’t know about how to help my students. I spent and continue to spend hours on the internet, and have paid to have myself trained in PGX and LMB.

If I were you, I’d assume that the teacher has great intentions (and your description of her reaction to your interference with her lesson supports this…) I’d buy her a copy of Reading Reflex and ask her to read it. That was the book that first explained reading to me in a way that made sense.

Good teachers want to learn how to help their students, but are often hindered by all of the nonteaching requirements of their jobs. Maybe RR will help your child’s teacher understand how important basic decoding skills are for our children.

Casey

I take it that your child has been identified for special services and you were observing a resource class? As with Casey, my undergraduate and graduate program do not emphasis phonics, which is key for children for students with learning disabilities to learn how to read. In my classes, both inclusion and resource, I use SRA Reading Series (http://www.sra4kids.com/product_info/direct/standard.phtml?CoreProductID=16&navid=6) to teach myself, and the kids, phonics. This is an expensive program and my school district supplies my materials. A book for you to use at home, or the outside tutor is “Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons” by Siegfred Englemann uses the same techniques as SRA reading series. I have students who have made 2 years reading growth in 5 months. When using these lessons, you have to be fast paced and consistent. This series will teach how to break up words and sound out words to decode unfamiliar words. Let me knwo what I can do to help.

Thanks for your opinions. I need to keep a good relationship with my child’s teachers and value input that keeps that relationship working.

Hi, Casey and Tracy are exactly right. I also have a master’s in special ed. and was not taught how to remediate reading disorders! It is really serving your child no purpose being in that class unless the teacher learns how to teach reading. I will say I have a preference of Reading Reflex over SRA. I think SRA is a good program, but I am working with a boy who went through SRA Reading Mastery for two years and still ended up being classified LD. I am using Phono-Graphix (Reading Reflex) with him and he is beginning to get it.

Please do buy the teacher a copy of Reading Reflex. It could help many children besides your own. If she does nto embrace it, I’d probably remove my child from that class and stick with the private tutor. What is the private tutor using?

Janis

Take a look at Looking Glass Spelling at www.gwhizresources.com. It teaches spelling by using decoding strategies that discourage guessing. It’s easy to use in a classroom for one or more students or at home as a supplement to help her learn to use word attack strategies on her own.
Fern

face the music honey- sad but true- that poor teacher probably has NO clue-it’s going be up to you IEP or no. just take good notes (for when you’re complaining to the state dept of ed re non-compliance of IEP)
b.t.w. doesn’t sound very INDIVIDUALIZED now does it?.
good luck and good on you for paying attention re report cards- they can bwe phoney baloneymake sue you have some kind of testing like woodcock jonson letter wor or word attack and comprehension in that IEP for next years goals. please go to wrightslaw.com and reidmartin.com

My tutor is using the Spalding method.She is also using Explode the Code both have visuals and is working pretty well.My child is doing pretty well in reading and in spelling.She would not be doing so well if I had not found such an excellent tutor. The tutor keeps her on track also.It’s great to hear her read so much better and with it her language keeps improving.

Thanks for information , my child is doing pretty well it was just she was doing more guessing and not moving forward.I had the goal changed and then viewed the reading class. My child was guessing at words because of no teacher reinforcement of sounding out skills. I then knew why my child had stalled in her reading developement.

If the teacher is really trying to learn from you and is willing to look at Reading Reflex, that is wonderful. So many teachers know little or nothing about phonics. However, (understand I don’t know you or the teacher but can only go by my own experience) I would be suspicious that the teacher is only humoring you to get you to go away. A resurgence of whole language seems to be sweeping my area like a storm. The teachers in my school are actually being taught by the new reading specialists that sounding out is bad. The theory is that when you are sounding out you cannot be attending to meaning. The reading specialist determined that my son was incapable of understanding advanced material because he- shock and horrors- sounds out words even though he was reading with over 99 percent accuracy. She said he needed to be placed in much easier books. It didn’t matter that he scored 98 percentile in vocabulary on standardized testing the year before. Testing means nothing…The catch phrase for children who sound out and supposedly have no understanding is “word calling” Of course if you predetermine that all children who sound out words lack comprehension skills without giving them comprehension tests, or refuse to take the results of testing seriously…well…guess what you are going to find?Lots and lots of mindless word callers! My son has actually described numerous lessons given by the reading specialist herself to the class,where all the kids are taught contextual guessing of words. Unfortunately, outside of predictable print, it dosen’t work very well. But, even if a teacher has been around a long time and knows better, if someone in Administration buys one of these programs…guess what the teacher HAS to do? I would suggest you do Reading Reflex and then Hooked on Phonics at home. Do a little bit consistently every day. Be persistent and you will see results.
P.S. Reminder to those who use “RR” for Reading Reflex, “RR” also stands for- cringe- Reading Recovery. 180 degrees apart in philosophy. .

As many others have pointed out, your teacher probably doesn’t know how to teach reading. Sad, but true. If you’re lucky she wants to know and will take your suggestions. Unfortunately in many cases teachers don’t want to know; they have bought into a belief system that reading can’t be taught and so if students fail that’s just too bad. If you find this hard to believe, go to your local college and read the elementary education texts in the bookstore — and try not to be nauseated. You will do best to get a private tutor for your child, making sure that your tutor uses a strong phonics program.

Get her some training in phonics instruction. Lindamood-Bell would be a nice beginning—they do a wonderful job with error handling.

It is just too bad that teachers do not receive the kind of instruction they need in order to teach phonics appropriately. Teachers, for the most part, wish to do a good job but do not have the tools for success. Many, though, aren’t very aggressive about going out to look for training…they passively accept what is offered by their college or district and think they’ve done enough.

But then, at the price of the LiPs training, it does not surprise me that few teachers receive it. If the district does not pay, and they frequently do not, the price is prohibitive for many teachers.

you summed it up better than i have ever seen on this board susan
thanks, libby

Yes, I agree with you that LiPS training is very cost prohibitive in most areas. (We are fortunate in K.C. to have a college program that is a semester-long training using the LiPS manual and home-made supplementary materials. For about $300-350, you have it. You can buy or make the blocks, tiles, etc. etc. People have redrawn the mouth pictures.) If this were built into pre-service or in-service requirements—instead of other meaningless drivel—then teacher would have the skills to teach this essential, but not exclusively essential, element. IOW, there are other essential elements, too…

The district for whom I work tried to put pure LmB in each school and the cost was just exhorbitant—so we bought a clone called Pathways to Reading. There’s more than one way to climb that mountain! Interestingly, the owner used to work in a clinic that used LmB procedures—trained by Pat herself!

Some get quite upset about these LmB clones, believing thinking that the Lindamoods invented this stuff—or have some kind of exclusive right to these P.A. tasks. Pat and Charles gleaned information from others’ research and put it into practice.

Susan, that is very interesting because someone just told me that Carmen McGuinness of Phono-Graphix was a Lindamood Bell tutor before PG!

Janis

I’m fading in & out on the board (as you all can see). I’m serving on a number of reading initiative committees and my spring IEP’s, Manifestation Determinations, Functional Behavior Assessments, Behavior Intervention Plans, and (yes) even a small amount remaining to actually plann lessons interferes with my free time. I basically have none.

I’m also taking another in a continuous stream of worthless classes. Two of them, in fact. It is no small wonder that teachers don’t know much. The classes are a joke. Who can fix that?

Please stop in as often as you can, Susan. We need you!

Janis

Well, there was an initiative when I was in Maryland to discontinue the elementary education major, because as presently constituted it is so useless that even the state governor noticed. I personally cheered — imagine if all new teachers actually knew something about linguistics or literature or math or science or history or *something*, and took a minor or a Master’s year in education with enough that they know how to operate in a classroom. Unfortunately the initiative died almost immediately under pressure from the entrenched powers (where would all those elementary ed professors go? What job skills do they have?). So we know that a state governor isn’t enough. But a groundswell of public complaint could do something — anybody who is a better organizer than I am can start, and I’ll be a charter member.

I have not had LiPs training and don’t plan to anytime soon. I have homemade letter tiles. I do use them particularly frequently with my beginners and only gradually phase them out. I do not find that the majority of my students need all the kinesthetic training that I believe is part of the program. I do direct their attention to some kinesthetic cues for certain difficult sounds. I find that my students seem to make good progress with my homemade version.

All I ever did to learn what I have is:
1. Word with a veteran teacher for a year who did have the LiPs training and picked up some basics.

2. Read this board and other materials extensively.

It has paid off, my students are by and large making solid progress and reading pretty well in the upper grades, a function partially of when they were identified.

So, I would agree that the training is great. I would also agree that any teacher who is motivated to become a better teacher can educate herself w/o a significant expenditure. However, my experience is that few teachers really have the motivation and interest to learn new tricks. If their district sends them to a training, they go and learn and apply. If they don’t, then they rarely seek out the changes themselves.

However, that particular criticism may be applicable to people in general. My engineer of a husband likes to quote that the average engineer reads a half of a professional book per year. He, on the other hand, is always seeking out current texts in his field, investing in them, reading and learning new tricks w/o having to be sent to trainings and classes.

I guess we are both endowed with that natural curiosity that drives us to always be searching for the next step or the better approach.

I would also ask how long the reading teacher has been in the job…years , I’ll bet; unlike my husband in the software industry who changes jobs constantly and learns new things each and every time. The union tenure system rewards teachers for staying in the same job(often using the same methods) for years.

Well, if the teacher is any good, and if her methods work, you *want* to keep her in that same job until she drops! Good teachers only get better with age and experience. They collect more materials, learn more techniques, refine their programs, and organize their classrooms for optimum results. Any good teacher will tell you that when you get a new assignment it takes at least a year to get a handle on the new program; if teachers change every year, schools go downhill (ask parents here about their experiences with constantly changing staff.)

I constantly bless the memory of Mrs. Ross, who had been teaching forever and ever when I had her in Grade 3. She taught me how to write — from totally illegible printing to acceptable copperplate, with dip pens and inkwells, in one year. She taught me how to be accurate in my math — previously I was the bright student who didn’t bother to write it down and made many errors. She taught me French grammar and pronunciation and reading, and I now teach French as a second language in a French city and French reading to native French-speaking kids, so she sure did a good job. She taught me at least the basics of reading music. Mrs. Ross was one of those teachers in the fifties who didn’t retire because there was a *real* teaching shortage during the baby boom (unlike the present supposed shortages, with thousands of qualified people looking). And she taught all this to all of us in a class of over thirty kids. Too bad teachers like her can’t be kept in the classroom fifty years longer.

Tenure is NOT a guaranteed job. Despite the falsehoods that are promulgated by a certain brand of politician, a tenured teacher has **less** protection than a factory worker with a union. Tenure means ONLY that if the school board wants to fire you, they have to have a hearing and present evidence — a protection which most workers in most jobs take for granted, or else you’d bring a lawsuit, right?
Teachers in the first two years before tenure have no protection whatsoever — it is written into their contracts that the school board can discontinue their employment any time for any reason. And if you fight, you can be blacklisted and never get any teaching job in that state ever again (and as certification is long and expensive and state-by-state, this is a much more serious threat than it would be in any other job.)
I have heard that in certain particular areas the teachers’ unions have gained a lot of political power — I am told that this is true in New York City for example — but that has *nothing* to do with the laws of tenure, and everything to do with local power politics.

Is is a powerful thing for the self-determined learner and a pitiful thing for those without the motivation to acquire knowledge. I agree with you completely about the training…working with someone who does it with children is the ultimate teacher training. The price is right, too!

Victoria, I am not a fan of that approach. CA eliminated the education major years and years ago. We are NOT doing a better job for it. Elementary teachers must secure a liberal arts major of some kind, then do a 5th year. The art history major, or whatever they choose to pursue, contributes little to nothing to their understanding of how to teach children math and language arts, it contributes nothing to understanding how people learn. The majority of the education training is compressed into the 5th year with the student teaching.

During my inferior training in Delaware years ago, I started getting in contact with students in my sophomore year. My junior year was devoted to taking 8 methods courses, two per quarter, which offered a 50/50 blend of theory and practicum. We were bussed out to schools and spend 50% of our time in classrooms working with teachers and students.

We took a sequence of three math classes designed for elementary education majors so we would have the math basis and understanding to TEACH math K-6.

The program was far from perfect, but it was far and away beyond anything teachers in training get in this get another major then do education model.

Our elementary teachers need to be well-grounded in educational psychology, they need to understand how people learn. Good teaching involves presenting material in a manner that it can be understood and learned. Teachers need a solid background and understanding in math and language arts, not to mention science and social studies.

I think education is a valid and worthy major in its own right. Who are we in the U.S. to relegate education to a nonmajor, electing instead to encourage our elementary teachers, who more than any other group of teachers need to understand how to teach and what to teach, to be art history or philosophy majors?

Now, if our colleges are not doing the job they should, then pressure needs to be applied until changes are forthcoming.

Education can and should be a valid major. Our children are worth it.

Your education major sounds like an excellent program — and a very rare bird indeed. It would certainly be nice if this were the standard.
The education majors that I meet on average are less well-educated that the average high school graduate — what little they knew out of high school they have forgotten in four years of gluing pieces of felt together.
In the area where I was living in Maryland, the situation had gotten so bad that the school board took all their new elementary ed graduates — people who had just finished a four year program and all that student teaching — and made them take a two-week intensive workshop in teaching reading before the school year started. Huh? These folks have just finished a full four years of education training, and they know so little about how to teach reading that (a) the school board had to try to make up the deficit in this way, and (b) two weeks could make up for what was missed over four years?