Phonographix results

My son was absolutely the worst in his class in first grade. He could not even pick out beginning letter sounds. They did work with him 1:2 with the reading recovery teacher every day. We did sylvan. He was still the worst.

I did PG with him the summer after first. He just learned to read. He could read anything. Even after PG he had difficulty reading for any length of time despite the fact that when he read short paragraphs above his age level he could answer all the questions that went along with the text. He really did not like to read even though he could.

It turned out he had severe visual tracking issues. After 12 weeks of vision therapy he reads books above his current third grade level for up to 40 minutes with excellent comprehension. He likes to read now.

There certainly are individual variations in response to PG. My son has been taught using PG and still does not have grade level decoding skills, despite much repetition. His sight word vocabulary is grade level. But my son had a severe reading disability with broad based processing deficits. We have found that PG “sticks” better as we reduce his deficits through therapy.

Beth

My son does not choose to use his knowledge in his reading. He tests well-actually I think he may benow be above grade level in decoding after testing way low years ago. I did phongraphix last summer(only part of it-time factor)and had 20 session of one on one tutoring done over the school year.

He is 11 and will guess and read at the speed of light unless someone is sitting there, listening to him read aloud, making him go back and decode “imposing’-he would probably say ‘important’ or a nonsense word like ‘ipsie’ and just keep reading!!!!!

I wonder if it would be different if we had done this at 6 or 7 before bad habits were formed.

I have been doing lots and lots of reading and research and found Phono-grpahix on this board. I have one kid who could not read to save his life. He couldn’t even read a complete sentence with little CVC words. This kid has had every program from Read Naturually, Reading Milestones, Explode the Code, Cognitive Reading Stategies, Reading Mastery, SRA Decoding B, and those are just a few. I don’t have records that go back to what they tried to do in Primary. Guess what, I used Phono-graphix. The kid just had reading buddies the other day and actually got to read a book to his first grade buddy for the first time. WOW. I couln’t be more pleased.

Now, I wouldn’t use PG as the only intervention. It is just decoding, then go on and do Great Leaps, or Read Naturally. It just works quickly and kids feel successful right away.

You just wouldnt believe how this has changed my teaching. I am trying to get really good at PG. I tried it on my hardest case, a non-reader with 68 IQ. I thought he might never read. I thought I should have perhaps tried my first try on someone who was not so low etc…. WEll, the program has worked. My principal is just amazed. The parent/grandparents are thrilled. The kid has hope. Now we still have a lot of work ahead of us. I am trying to get the junior high to use this programnow to follow up on what has worked. I am letting others in my district learn about this in case they are open to change.

I have now seen it with my own eyes. Now, I want to improve my skills so I can do it on a larger scale. It is very exciting. The more I learn, the more I see I need to learn. We must be open for new ideas and things that work if it helps kids. I try to take on each kid as if he/she were my own kid. I just must do everything in my power to get the kid learning. PG is one of the tools that is helping me. It has motivated me.

Email me if you would like me to email you some information I ‘m putting together for other teachers in my distict who want to learn more about PG.
Michelle

michele,

what did PG do that the others did not, compare the programs this boy used,

what skills was this boy lacking, etc, was his segmenting weak, and how did you fix that and how did that impact his ability to read, how quickly did he learn orthgraphic patterns etc,

in order for progress to made on this BBS, we need to examine the skills taught in these programs and are they taught clearly etc

it is easy to say nothing worked, better yet to say why nothing worked, what made a certain program work, let’s get more specific

libby

Hi Karen,
I have 11 kids in my reading class. Eight of them have had most of their accommodations dropped. Most of them have shown great improvement in their grades and those that haven’t, have other issues that stop them from succeeding, talking in class or not studying for tests but not because they can’t read. There has been a great progress in the kids that I taught last year in an 11th grade English in which I taught them how to read first and then write. Most of them went into an academic English inclusion class and some have the highest grades in the class. Four of them already have been accepted into colleges in which last year was unthinkable. In my private practice, my students are all on honor role and two of my juniors are making plans to go to college. My one girl was invited to join a creative writing class this year that not only has an A average in it and five other subjects but may submit her different stories for publication! As for my daughter, my first success, as you know is on Dean’s list in college. I have not had one student that I have taught to read, that hasn’t improved their grades and dropped accommodations. One girl exited sped this year and I have probably at least five more next year and more that will just be on monitor status. It works and continues working..

You might think about doing error correction and really teach him how to stop at periods and pause at commas. You must stop him doing all of the bad reading habits that he has picked up from poor teaching instruction in the past.

Marycas — yes, it almost certainly would have been different if he had learned to read and not guess, but we can’t turn back the clock so let’s deal with now.
I get a lot of students like this. I sit with them and have them read with me and I make them go back and self-correct again and again and again. It takes a *lot* of time, but it is important. I know it’s a huge demand, but if you can, you should sit with him as much as possible — an hour a day if you can swing it — and have him do *all* his reading, his homework and assignments, out loud to you, error correcting all the way. Basically, he should realize that he is reading and understanding better and getting his homework doen more efficiently by reading things correctly, and he should just get sick of having to go back over things and realize it’s better - and faster! - to get it right the first time. Habit is really hard to change — ask any smoker — but keep up the good fight.

Hi Karen,
I did PG with my son a little over a year ago. He made tremendous gains in word attack and blending. He went from not being able to read even the simplest words to keeping up with his class.

Unfortunately, for my son, fluency and accuracy is still an issue. He avoids reading at all costs and has extreme difficulty with reading chapter books. I believe my son has other processing deficits that are holding him back and somehow these deficits will need to be remediated.

I think that he may need to do more error correction. You actually should do it until he can read a paragraph without error. Also, explain to him that reading is like playing sports, if he doesn’t practice reading by reading, he won’t improve. If he is having problems with fluency, have him do Great Leaps.

I did this and it really didn’t get him to love reading.

I now realize that doing this actually was torturing him because he had no tracking ability and reading was very uncomfortable. I think if I had persisted I could have really turned him off reading altogether.

Some would probably have called him lazy or add.

“Can’t sit and pay attention long enough to read, or just to lazy to try.”

After some vision therapy he can track and loves to read. He sat in the hammock on vacation and just read and read.

Just to give you a bit of encouragement, Laura….

My son’s Neuronet therapist told me he had issues with auditory motor integration. Once I understood what she meant (saying what you can hear), I told her I had this issue all my life. I have the hardest time learning to pronounce unusual names, for example, and a foreign language was a total flop (speaking—I could read spanish). Of course, I have no trouble reading but she told me that was because I don’t have other processing issues. One thing about taking your kid for therapy is you learn the names for all your own quirks!!

Anyway, we did the exercises she prescribed and his word skipping and miscalling dropped in half!!!! Seems to be lots of little things put together that are causing his problems.

I long for the day that he sits and a hammock and reads, like Linda’s son. Right now, he will lock himself in his room and listen to books on tape (Holes, Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events are his favorites these days) It may never happen but at least we are bit by bit getting to the point that he will be functional for school. He can always continue to listen to books on tape for pleasure.

Beth

It’s funny. I used to think by having my son read all the time I could “make” him a “reader.” My goal was to make him a “top reader” in his class so I spent this whole year having him read at least 30 minutes to an hour every day. This included extensive error correction, slowing down for accuracy, occassionally speeding up for fluency, reading above level, below level, decoding multisyllable word lists, going over vowel teams, r-controlled vowels, studying the orthographic patters over and over and over….etc…

What I’ve learned this last year is that my son’s problems are much more global than I realized and extend beyond reading.
I believe PG is an excellent program that by itself (along with reading practice) would remediate a majority of children’s reading difficulties. But I think my son’s problems require that other areas be remediated as well. Exactly where and how to do this is another question. Hopefully I can get some answers and ideas about this soon.

And I think they may stem from either a visual or processing speed deficit, and/or memory.

Interestingly, I borrowed a vision therapy video from the library. It has some really good exercises on it. One exercise is for Visual Memory. Using 3x5 index cards, cut them in half and write the letters of the alphabet on each square. On 10 full-size cards write 3 random letters; on 10 more 4 random letters; 10 more 5 random letters… Place all the letters on the table. Show a 3 letter card for 3 seconds, then take the card away and have the child try to reproduce the series of letters with the individual letter cards. In creating this game I used lowercase letters. I decided to start off using 4 random letters.

The interesting thing I learned is that out of 10 cards with 4 random lettetrs (each held up for a very “generous” 4 seconds), my son had at least one or more letters incorrect every single time. Sometimes, 2-3 wrong. This surprised me a little. My son doesn’t have any obvious visual processing difficulties. But he’s definitely not visually processing or recognizing letter patterns quickly enough. Why he can’t do this regardless of the amount of repetition to these patterns is the real question and specifically how to best help remediate this is another one.

I think you are learning the same lesson I have—the hard way. That lesson is if you try and try and it doesn’t work, you don’t keep beating your head against the wall. You do something else. We were fortunate enough that this strategy got us through Fast Forward which gave me this false sense that perserverance will get you any where. But I too have learned, it doesn’t.

I have book by critical thinking on visual perceptual skill building and the type of exercise you are talking about is visual sequential memory. Perhaps the difficulty is more with sequencing than with visual processing alone. Do you have Levine’s book “All Kinds of Minds”? He talks about sequencing in it.
This is a difficult thing for my son to do too—the only exercise he ouldn’t do in this book-at least a couple years ago. We did some similar stuff with PACE which did seem to help some.

It is hard sometimes to get to the bottom of these processing quirks that seem to have such an effect on our children. I do know, as I said, that the exercises we did reduced his errors in half. I too had been doing error correction and the like. And like your son, it didn’t seem to make much difference, no matter how diligent I was.

Beth

Beth

Vision builder does something like this. You can start with letters then go on to words.
I think it is very good and even a little fun.

Hi Beth and Linda,

Weirdly (my son makes absolutely no sense and it’s extremely frustrating!!! :-(, when he was tested at the last VT (and even school testing, I think the test was something like TVPS?) he scored unusually high in visual perceptual testing. I think the difference was time (no time restraints) and a use of patterns instead of letters or numbers (example: ++00+++00).

I think the problem is lower case letters of the alphabet (and numbers too) along with processing speed.

Linda, I think Vision Builder may help with this.

Laura,

Has your son ever taken the Woodcock Cognitive test? My son took it a couple of years ago and once Robin G, who used to post regularly, interpreted it, it was quite enlightening (the school was clueless as to its meaning). There is a test named Long Term memory which Robin said actually tests associative memory—the ability to place in long term memory the association between things. Anyway, this includes letters and sounds, as well as numbers. My son scored very low on this and relatively low on short term memory but average on auditory and visual processing and processing speed. She told me this was a profile of a kid who had trouble integrating the visual and auditory pieces and would have a hard time mastering basic skills but could do well, depending on other skills, in upper grades.

Anyway, I wonder if this might be what is underlying what is going on with your son. Maybe it isn’t speed in general but ability to rapidly recall letters and sounds because he still doesn’t totally know them. This might explain why he doesn’t have any trouble with speed of visual processing when it isn’t letters and sounds—it isn’t the visual processing itself that is problematic but something more related to integration.

Another explanation is a RAN issue, which my son also tested as having at that time (tested 10% on Test of Word Finding, tested 49% after doing Neuronet). I think with a RAN deficit it is in long term memory but has difficulty being retrieved while associative memory is more connected to ever really learning it to start with and thus getting it in long term memory—despite much repetition.

I may be totally off base but I know you will have the good sense to ignore my ideas, if they don’t describe your son.

Beth

Hi Beth,
My son’s deficits are similar. Today I had a chance to skim through “Overcoming Dyslexia” and read through a section that described how important it is to teach, reteach and continue reteaching these orthographic patterns over and over again.

I think some kids, like my son, may need to go through PG much more extensively with a lot more word sorting practice. I may even create extra word sorting lists.

Hi Laura,
You are absolutely correct. Some kids need more practice with the advanced code than others and you should always have the vowel and consonant charts out for him to look at. You should also have him memorize the charts per sound as he reads. This is what I do. I have the student look at the sound, for example, /o-e/, then I say: What do you see different and the same with these choices of letters for the sound /oe/? We look at all of the choices and he points out the differences such as all of them have more than one vowel except for ‘ow’, ew,(sew) and ‘ough’. We play around with them, make up a poem or a rap song just for fun. Remember, that the more that you work with the letter combination, the more the brain is ‘seeing’ them and it is imprinting them on it. You are right, with some kids, not many, in my experience, it does take longer. Just remember, it normally takes at least two years for a child to learn to read and comprehend and we are asking our older children to take much shorter time. They also have to read every day after you have finished PG. They must practice their skills and this is the hard part. These children just don’t want to read even when they can. Don’t forget that it may take a longer time doing error correction than just a few weeks.

I think this is true—the need for repetition. It is also frustrating—this need for overlearning. I also think that some kids, like my son, also don’t see the patterns–I notice that Rosner’s book on Helping Children over come Learning disabilities has a whole exercise/section that is similar to Glass Analysis. The idea being to teach children to recognize patterns. What is interesting to me is that my K aged son is doing this automatically. Watching/teaching him to read has made clear what a disadvatage my LD son is at with reading.

I would also do the exercises where you write the sounds as you say it. My son literally would forget what a letter looked like!!! He doesn’t seem to do that anymore, although last week when he was very tired he wrote a w instead of an m on something. Yesterday he reread it and asked me why there was a w!!!!

Beth

I get around the need for repetition without driving myself and the student up the wall by using varied materials at the same level; several different readers for the same grade, instead of re-reading the same materials; a set of workbook that involves huge built-in repetition — called Check and Double Check for a reason! — a second-string group of workbooks to back up the first if necessary; handwritten cards; whatever works.

Hi Karen,

I am a parent of an 11 year old boy with severe dsylexia/processing deficits. We tried PG and were not successful (but I highly recommend it). He has been tutored 1:1 in the Orton-Gillingham method 2 hours per week and has made huge gains. His tutoring is being paid for by the school district … they too had concerns regarding his fluency. After about 4 months of tutoring - where clearly he was making giant gains in individual word attack and decoding skills he was not making the same amount of gain in fluency. However, his tutor (who is the best!) kept telling the school that he would indeed gain in fluency but it would take time. Then after Christmas which was after about 6 months of tutoring, he suddenly took off in fluency, just as the tutor had said. He has periods of slower reading at his instructional level when he is learning new syllable types, but gains again once he has mastered the new material and had lots and lots of practice.

It still baffles me that schools somehow equate decoding or as they say “word calling” with diminished comprehension. It just seems logical that a person would comprehend more clearly a sentence or particular word when they actually decode the word correctly. Granted there are times when, after successfully decoding a word, I say to my son, do you know what that word means - and then give a brief explanation. But I fail to see how he would know what that word was by simply guessing - as the schools here in SC kept teaching him - unsuccessfully. His comprehension of text that he has read and decoded (with some explanations of meaning) is great - he is able to answer both verbal and written questions about the passage. Yet still the school keeps saying that “they are worried about his comprehension”. Based on what - I don’t know …. I think it is their preconceived notion that decoding is somehow arcaic and guessing is so much more desirable.

Sorry if I sound a little miffed about the whole thing … just thought you might want a parents view of the fluency/comprehension thing.

Pam

Hi again,

I forgot to add that my son’s teacher also used the Great Leaps fluency program along with the Orton Gillingham and I am sure it had a positive effect on his gains in fluency - plus he like to do the exercises and beat his times!!

Pam

Hi Shay,
I think my son needs EXTENSIVE word sorting practice (pre-advanced code?!). I was thinking of creating more word lists for him. (Do you happen to know if they sell something like this on the Readamerica website?). We do a lot of error correction and like Beth I keep a white board nearby while reading so we can decode and go over the patterns. I’ve been doing this now for a little over a year.

I’m sure general reading practice helps the majority of kids, but my son seems to need more drilling of those basic patterns. So we’ll keep plugging away!

Thanks for reminding me that learning to read often takes these kids more than two years. It helps to keep that in mind.

Beth,
I know what you mean about letter recognition. My son seems to have that down most of the time, but he too the other day mistook an “H” for a “W” in a word. I don’t have Rosner’s book, but I need to get it.

Victoria,
You have a good point about varied materials. I need to continue trying to do that. It’s very difficult to keep these kids from hating reading. I’ve been wanting to get some good decodable readers. If you or anyone knows of any good ones that have relentless repetition of those confusing vowel teams (like ow, ou, ough, or ai, ae, etc…) that would be great. I’ve been wondering if Wilson (or something else) might be good for this?

Thank you all for your very helpful and informative responses. I’ve decided to order Great Leaps and see how that works with improving my son’s fluency. He’s been through the Wilson Reading program in the past and I want to try something different that is especially targeted for improving fluency. That is the area that he seems to want to improve.
karen

Wilson does have books that are for older kids and they take one sound and stress it with all of the digraphs for that sound. They are stupid little stories but good for decoding.

This past year I worked with a fourth grader, reading at first of first grade level, who had already repeated both the first and fourth grades. I spent 12 hours with him and by the end of the school year his teacher tested him to be reading at the end of third grade level. I brought in a national trainer to Chattanooga to teach and certify in a 35 hour course every paid staffer as a PG therapist in our oldest adult literacy program. It has revolutionized their tutoring. I am now working on supporting the AmeriCorps effort here which includes 24 tutors working 20 hours a week. We could reach over 960 kids in one school year with 18 hours of PG training.

The problem I have is convincing the schools to learn about PG. Any suggestions or info would be helpful.

Howard

PS I got certified in Florida and was taught by the founders.

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This past year I worked with a fourth grader, reading at first of first grade level, who had already repeated both the first and fourth grades. I spent 12 hours with him and by the end of the school year his teacher tested him to be reading at the end of third grade level. I brought in a national trainer to Chattanooga to teach and certify in a 35 hour course every paid staffer as a PG therapist in our oldest adult literacy program. It has revolutionized their tutoring. I am now working on supporting the AmeriCorps effort here which includes 24 tutors working 20 hours a week. We could reach over 960 kids in one school year with 18 hours of PG training.

The problem I have is convincing the schools to learn about PG. Any suggestions or info would be helpful.

Howard

PS I got certified in Florida and was taught by the founders.