Cove School in Illinois

I vaguely remember sometime in the past two years hearing good things about it — haven’t heard anything since either good or bad.

Having worked at a fantastic school, for many, many students and parents the fantastic part pales next to the “Special” part. *Especially* when they are deciding where to go, one significant — and valid— fear is that a special school will do what special ed unfortunately can serve to do in other settings — maybe provide a successful environment, but one the kid’s dependent on for success.
Where I worked, quite often a serious priority and goal for parents and students when they first entered the school was “getting back to regular school.” Quite often, in a month or a year, that idea was tossed to the winds for the kinds of reasons you stated. On the other hand, for others a year or two of intensive work on skills and strategies really did give the kiddo enough tools so that s/he could independently return to a school with bigger classes and a lot less individualized attention, and be successful. As often as not, though, they realized that they got *more,* not less challenge in the “special” school… just challenge structured for success by the students instead of challenge imposed by arbitrary standards.

Another question. In the sped schools, where the students receive this intensive remedial instruction, I would assume the classes are modified for the students learning.

What I am trouble understanding is: If the curriculum is modified for a student with LD, isn’t there a good chance that he will not be learning the same things as the gen ed students. Wouldn’t putting a sped student in a regular class in high school with modifications to the amount of material being tuahgt , just make it harder for him to keep up. How much modification can be done before the course being covered is completely changed for the sped student and different than the one being taught to the regular ed students? Say the assignment is to learn 20 vocabulary words, the student has a modification to learn 10. Isn’t he learning less because he didn’t learn the other 10? How could he keep up for the next level course?

It seems like the more I try to learn, the more confused I become.

I don’t know if this really answers your question, but what I have found with my 10yo daughter is that she learns a great deal more when the teaching method is tailored to her needs. For example, her regular 4th grade class gets 20 spelling words a week, pulled from their current reading material. There is no way my dyslexic dd can learn 20 unrelated spelling words a week! I had her excused from those spelling lists and instead work with her at home using an orthographic (rule-based) approach to spelling. With this method she can learn 20, 40, 60 or more words a week — because she learns spelling patterns that make sense to her.

Modification doesn’t necessarily mean lowered expectations or less learning. Modification also means changes in how materials are taught. This is probably where a specialized LD school can excel compared to a regular classroom. Vocabulary words, for example, might be taught and discussed primarily in an oral manner at the LD school — which might be a much more efficient way for an LD student to learn vocabulary words than a traditional approach of looking them up in the dictionary and writing sentences.

Mary

Hi Mary,

What curriculum are you using to teach your daughter spelling? How does this orthographic method correspond with PG’s reading method?

Blessings, momo

THe big difference is how the stuff is taught, and how well it’s learned. Teachign differently doesn’t mean lowered expectations, even when things like the quantity of vocab. words learned is lowered. That’s a good example because the tons of verbal stuff is often where LD kids just break down — though every kid is different!
So I can give a kid 20 words and he knows he has to get 15 of ‘em to pass so he will cram the words into his brain and just maybe, maybe get ‘em on the next quiz or test… no, he doesn’t have the time to play with the ideas, understand them, make the connections…

… Or I can give him 10 words — the most important concepts, not the names of the third neurocranial nerve — and expect him to understand them, answer higher level questions about them, and know them all year, not just this Thursday. WHen *that* kid goes into the regular ed class, he’ll remember Science and have the background the regurgitator next door may or may not have.

At New Community, there were no multiple guess tests… lots and lots of drawings, paragraphs, essays — emphasis on comprehension, not word retrieval, but very rigorous. Some of ‘em came back from college and said it was easier, not harder :)

I am using the method outlined in the spelling chapter of “Multisensory Teaching of Basic Language Skills” edited by Judith Birsh. I highly recommend this book, which covers much more than just spelling. Initially I got it from inter-library loan but, I liked it so much, I ended up buying my own copy from Amazon.

Incidentally, there are a couple of paragraphs in the book about working on accented and unaccented syllables. I meant to email you about that and forgot.

Process spelling is very compatible with an orthographic approach, but scratch-sheet spelling is not. Our experience validates the chapter on spelling in the “Multisensory” book — that presentation of all possible spellings of a given sound confuses dyslexics who have visual processing issues. I normally present only 2 or 3 possible spellings of a word at a time, and I present them with a word sort that visually emphasizes the most common spelling. Later on, less common spellings are introduced one at a time, as exceptions.

The chapter in the “Multisensory” book is just a beginning. I have been using it for about two months with dd, who has gone from ending-K level spelling to beginning 3rd grade spelling (her reading has been fluent 4th/5th grade since PG-intensive in October). I’ve ordered several commercial programs so we can continue on, but they haven’t arrived yet, so I don’t know which one we will use. I did get the Sopris West “Roots” program and have taken a look at it. Once we finish with orthography, I plan to continue word study using “Roots” for morphology.

My conclusion is that PG provides explicit instruction in decoding that helps children learn to read. Its spelling approach is sufficient for many of those children, but not all. Some children, like my daughter, also need explicit instruction in orthography to become proficient in spelling.

Hope this is more clear than mud!

Mary

“I normally present only 2 or 3 possible spellings of a word at a time” is not correct. I meant that I normally present only 2 or 3 possible spellings of a ***sound*** at a time.

Mary